For those interested - and to allay some of the emails I’ve been getting - the first draft of Destroyer of Worlds: Book Three of Kingdom of the Serpent is now complete and we are still on course for an August 2009 publication.

A major study by medical experts at UK and US hospitals is trying to shed some light - of the end of the tunnel variety - on near-death experiences.

Attempts to explain NDEs away as hallucinations have generaly failed because hallucinations are random and person-specific. NDEs follow a very established pattern - rising out of the body, travelling up a tunnel towards a bright light, a sense of tremendous well-being, whole-life review, meeting a figure of light and dead relatives and friends. Those who experience it are profoundly altered.

Others have suggested its the dying brain dealing with a lack of oxygen and a flood of endorphins, but other studies have shown the brain responds in a totally different way to those two things.

Friends I have in the medical profession are certainly very interested in this, and see it as a definite phenomenon that deserves this kind of detailed study.

* Halfway through penultimate chapter, careening downhill with plot-lines flying off everywhere…

* Penultimate chapter of ‘Destroyer of Worlds’ now underway!

* It’s past midnight and I’m not wearing rags. They lied to me.

* @charliefarlie8 I want the one where she’s holding a bloody moosehead…

* Doctors second draft. Done.

I’m now dj-ing at Blip.fm.

I can’t write without music playing. I tend to have pretty eclectic tastes, with a range of different modes to conjure up the right atmosphere. But I’m always on the look-out for something I haven’t heard before.

Send me your music recommendations…

Courtesy of Erik Larsen and Image Comics.

Tentative dates for books I’ ve got coming out in 2009 - all are subject to change.

May - World’s End: Book One of the Age of Misrule (US)
June - Darkest Hour: Book Two of the Age of Misrule (US)
June 11 - The Burning Man: Book Two of Kingdom of the Serpent (mass-market paperback) (UK)
July - Always Forever: Book Three of the Age of Misrule (US)
August - The Lord of Silence: The Ghost Warrior Book One (UK and US)
August - Destroyer of Worlds: Book Three of Kingdom of the Serpent (Hardback and trade paperback)(UK)

There may well be one final new book to be announced by the end of the year. My US publisher also hopes to have the first of my new Swords of Albion series out in October, but as my UK publisher hasn’t scheduled it until early 2010, they may try to align publication dates.

This has been a public service announcement.

In the UK, two million people are now employed in creative jobs. Those people account for 7.3 % of the British economy - around £60 billion - with a growth rate over the last ten years of twice that of the economy in general. Annual exports of the UK’s cultural goods racks up to £11.6 billion.

If you’re currently thinking of a creative career, don’t be put off. When I was at school, our careers advisor basically had two options for the kids: accountancy for the dangerous intellectuals, and down the pit for those with talents in other areas. He told me the chances of becoming a journalist were ‘next to nothing’ and I had ‘no hope’ of becoming a writer: people from a working background couldn’t do that.