I’m a big fan of Kemper Norton‘s rural atmospherics. To me, it’s all moon over standing stones, lonely moors and wintry rivers with some bucolic summer headiness thrown into the mix.

The Kernow collective has just got in touch with me to say they’ve got some new music available to download here, for free. It’s an ep, called Lowender, which means happiness in Cornish, and is described as “an overstimulated and unstable celebration of Cornish festivals”.

If you like it, give them a donation.

Yes, it’s a church. Deconsecrated recently. Apparently, the neighbours are not happy. Robert Plant held his album launch here just the other day. Nonetheless, it was a venue with gravitas for such an important milestone for my publisher.

Although, for a company which does very nicely out of Dan Brown, I expected the floor to open up and a quest through the catacombs to find the canapes.

At Fantasycon 2010 this past weekend, I moderated a panel discussing the tightrope authors have to walk between writing what they want and maintaining a commercial career in the current tough publishing environment. For anyone aspiring to be an author, it’s essential listening:

(The sound quality may not be great in parts due to microphone malfunction, but it does improve if you persevere. Many thanks to Adele at Un:Bound for getting it all down.)

The panel guests are Saran Pinborough, Mark Morris, Conrad Williams and Tim Lebbon, all horror authors now working in other areas. We touched on why horror is commercially dead as a genre (as opposed to individual novels) and the difficult issues facing writers of SF and fantasy in an industry going through a period of rapid change.

It’s worth another blogpost on the challenges facing all the speculative genres in the coming years, I think. Whatever you’re used to on the genre front, the landscape is going to look very different.

“U.S. scientists have found a way to levitate the very smallest objects using the strange forces of quantum mechanics, and said on Wednesday they might use it to help make tiny nanotechnology machines.”

Don’t you love popular science reporting? Who would ever have guessed that nanotechnology machines were “tiny”? And what about those “strange forces” of quantum mechanics? Spooky.

Tomorrow, Saturday September 4, I’ll be signing books at Waterstone’s Burton-on-Trent branch in Cooper’s Square from 11am.

Then I’ll be putting in an appearance at the annual British Fantasy Society convention, Fantasycon, on Saturday September 18 at the Britannia Hotel in Nottingham.