Orbit's new USA imprint is showing its first signs of life: orbitbooks.net. And the first book displayed on their publishing schedule is ... Winterbirth. It's scheduled for release in September. This is a good and exciting thing.

Labels: Covers, Orbit, Winterbirth

A visit to one of my favourite near-Edinburgh spots: Aberlady Bay. A place of sand dunes, bird song, big skies and bracing air.

Labels: Photos, Scotland

I'm pretty sure Edinburgh has more festivals per head of population than anywhere else on the planet. This is the first time I get to take part in one, though. GhostFest 2007 includes a strand of events called 'Writers With Bite', and in the midst of it can be found: Dark Fantasies, 7.30pm on Saturday 12th May, featuring Alan Campbell, Deborah J. Miller and me.

Well, maybe not technically, but it sure feels like it. Heat, almost cloudless blue skies, not a breath of wind, butterflies, six buzzards drifting in big circles way, way up above the house. Each winter, I half-forget just how much nicer, how much easier on the spirit, the summer is. It's good to be reminded. And if summers are going to start in April from now on, they're going to be looong.

On a whole other subject: you didn't think Superman's Fortress of Solitude was imaginary, did you? Oh no. Here's the photographic proof.

That I have stumbled across the following at a time when there's hostage-type stuff going on in Iran is, honestly, entirely coincidental ... I have been reading (and enjoying, but that's beside the point) Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. I was thinking what a cool movie it would make in these days of CGI wonders, and did a bit of idle web-searching. I soon discovered that it was nearly made into a movie in the 1970s. It doesn't seem to ever have got out of development, but the work done on it wasn't entirely wasted, since it apparently did become a key component of a CIA plan to extricate 6 Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis that started in 1979. Seriously, I'm not making this stuff up. Here's the evidence (complete with cool concept art by comics legend Jack Kirby):