I’m currently neck-deep in the second draft of The Scar-Crow Men, where I expect to be for a while, so it will be a little quiet around here.

But just to keep things ticking over, here’s a new interview about The Sword of Albion, by Sandy Auden at SF Site.

And here’s an appreciation of The Dark Age books by Rick Kleffel at The Agony Column, which also includes a look at Mark Charan Newton’s excellent Nights of Villjamur.

…in one hour. I’ve been asked to hold a workshop for would-be fantasy authors at the alt.fiction one-day event in Derby, UK, on June 12.

It’ll cover devising your world, your protagonist, and your main storyline as well as a section on what you need to do to get your work to the attention of editors and agents. All in one hour. It’s fast-paced. You’ll need to think quickly and work hard, but you will find it rewarding. Come with paper and pen. And it’s an early start, for me – 10am – so I will undoubtedly be curmudgeonly. I will need caffeine.

I’ll also be doing a signing at 4pm with other Midlands authors Graham Joyce, Kim Lakin-Smith and Gav Thorpe.

Then at 9pm I’ll be doing a panel with Stephen Volk, Rob Shearman and Bill Boyes on writing for TV.

Art genius John Picacio has made his Pyr cover to World’s End available as free download wallpaper, including a version for iPhone.

You can get it here.

Is this going to stop all you lot asking for free Picacio artwork? Probably not. Sigh.

This is from author Neil Ayres, who knows I’m interested in the whole future of publishing/technology interface:

Neil’s built an iPhone app for his new novel, The New Goodbye. He says:

“As well as my book, there’s a version of Miguel Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs, which, if you’re not familiar with it, is a nice little tale of two dogs who for whatever reason are given the power of speech one night, with one proceeding to tell the other his life story. This story has been given a new lease of life by Johanna Basford, an illustrator (she’s doing all the literature for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe), who has created a two metre long pen and ink version of the story, which we’ve squished into little iPhone-screen chunks that can be scrolled through. Russell’s built this to load in a similar way to Google Maps, so you can also scroll through the entire thing.

To round everything off (there’re also a couple of my short stories, a music track that takes its lead from the novel and some photography from the competition we ran for a cover model), the main cover’s by fashion photographer Nicole Heiniger.”

More here. And you can get to the app store here.

You don’t want to seem like a nutter when you’re on public radio. So when the host asks me – as they always do – where do you get your ideas from, I steer clear of the truthful answer: “psychic connections through the aether” or “hypnagogic messages dictated by our mysterious overlords“. I usually mutter something about stumbling across an interesting fact. Always go for the boring option. It keeps you out of the coats with no arms.

But we can speak honestly here. We all know about the mysterious connections in life. The stuff that goes on behind all those scientific processes. The weird, inexplicable occurrences lurking in the corners of day-to-day existence. The gods and imps and fairies and demons that we like to call other things because, you know, that whole coats with no arms thing…

When I say “the universe speaks to me”, I mean it speaks to all writers, all musicians, all artists. We each tend to put a different face on it, but it’s the same voice. So where do my gods and fairies and demons lurk?

In pubs with stone and timber and glowering locals and beer with strange names. In deep rural life which city folk think is backward, but is wild and dangerous and so removed it might as well be another planet. In bands that you might stumble across in the back rooms of pubs and never hear from again. In stone circles, crumbling ruins, lonely pools, old houses. Across those city liminal zones – industrial estates under sodium at 3am, empty, broken-windowed factories and wasteground with rainbow-streaked puddles. In black-faced, mirror-glassed morris men and biker gangs. In snatches of music heard after midnight. In moots and meets and markets held under moonlight. These are the places where stories are born. These are the locations where my writing gods live.

And for a specific example, here’s one of the inspirations for Age of Misrule…

The Dancing Did remain one of my favourite bands, a quarter of a century after they split up. Characterised as “neo rustic pagan bop” or “a cross between The Clash and Steeleye Span”, you can find out more about them here.

Their album, And Did Those Feet, is little-known but essential, particularly if you like fantasy or any of those things I listed above. The lyrics are clever, witty and poetic and deal with ancient things encroaching on the modern world – listen to ‘The Wolves of Worcestershire‘ or ‘Charnel Boy‘. A remixed version with a booklet and additional tracks is available from Cherry Red.

The Dancing Did’s thematic equivalent today may well be Cornish collective Kemper Norton though the music is very, very different. I came across them through the regular ravings of Warren Ellis, another fan. More inspiration. I bet they never imagined they’d be dragging a story about Elizabethan spies and Faerie into the light…