Wow.

The Phoenix Convention in Dublin took place over the weekend, and I was asked to be Guest of Honour. It was huge, huge fun. It’s always nice to go somewhere and feel that you’re at the centre of things, but this was different; that old line about strangers being friends you haven’t met yet is the actual truth at an event like #pcon. That makes it special.

When I got home last night I was completely exhausted and I had a ton of things to say. This morning, inevitably, I’m wrapping myself round a cup of tea and thinking how wonderful it was and many of those things have completely evaporated, leaving behind that infuriating sense of “if you think a bit longer, you’ll remember me…”

However: I do remember saying in the “what non-genre fiction do you read?” panel that one of the things I’m conscious of when I read something amazing that I didn’t write is sheer envy. True. But I missed something when I said that, and it was brought home to me on the flight back to London. At the airport, I finally picked up a copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I started reading it, and immediately stopped to write four pages of a new novel on the backs of our boarding passes, in pen, on a pretty bumpy flight, using my tray-table as a study desk and fighting nausea as we hit the occasional airpocket.

Really good books can send you roaring off to write your own stuff. I do feel envy at the brilliance of Mitchell’s prose. But it doesn’t hurt. It just makes me want to play, too.

What else?

Actually, no! I can’t recap the whole thing. It’s impossible. Read the Twitter feed, the blogs. There’ll be some video in due time, as well… it was amazing.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Peter McClean for asking me, to Cheryl Morgan, to everyone.

Wow.

GET IT NOW!

So here’s the deal: a few weeks ago I got a message from @gregmcqueen: would I contribute to an anthology for Haiti? Something of a no-brainer. I had a story sitting around which had had a brief moment in the sun on Radio 3′s excellent The Verb show, and I’d been meaning to release it some other way so that people could read it. Because, y’know, that’s what it’s for. The story was called All Or Nothing Days, and it sort-of-but-doesn’t-really fits loosely with The Gone-Away World. It also sort-of-but-doesn’t-really fits with a couple of stories I had published in Interzone in the late 90s. Yes, I am an old fart. Yes, there are people born in the 90s who can now vote. Shut up.

Anyway. Greg actually asked me to write an intro as well, so even aside from 99 other great stories stories in a huge variety of styles and voices from a bunch of writers who can really do their thing, you get a double helping of moi and you get to give money to charity. See how awesome that is?

Here’s a couple of other perspectives on the metastory of 100 Stories [1,2] but the real deal is that the book is now out.

Yes. The book is out now. I’ll say it again. You can now buy this book and do good and get cool stuff to read.

To find our where you can pick up your copy: here

You can preview the first 30 pages of the book here: here

So: rush out and buy, buy, buy!