Lizbeth Myles and I have done another commentary track for a Hammer blu-ray box set! Stolen Face (1952) is a neat little black and white thriller, and we found lots to say about it! It’s out on 16th February, and you can read all about it and pre-order it here at Hammer.

My company Cosmic Lighthouse is publishing its first graphic novel this summer: Salvation’s Child.

Salvation’s Child is the graphic novel Prologue to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s best-selling SFF novel series The Final Architecture. (So new readers can start here!) It’s by Adrian himself, artist Mike Collins, colour artist Pippa Bowland and letterer Simon Bowland. We’re publishing it together with our partners ComiXology.

Check out these pre-order links at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

And you can find Cosmic Lighthouse at this link on Instagram.

Salvation’s Child will be released by ComiXology Originals on 16th June!

Up for pre-order now, and also out on 16th June is The Lychford Collection 2, featuring my fourth, fifth and sixth Lychford novellas!

I’m one of a whole bunch of comickers contributing to Legendary Comics’ Monarch: The Lost Adventures, a graphic novel anthology which tells stories in the continuity of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters TV series. (And we stick very closely to the lore.) My story, which I loved writing, concerns Bill Randa’s wartime encounter with the Ion Dragon, and is wonderfully rendered by Drew Zucker and Brad Simpson on art and colour art. The anthology is out on 14th July, and is up for pre-order now!

I’ve re-stocked my Ko-fi online store, with all my current works, which you can get cheaper than anywhere else, plus you can have them signed and personalised! Right now, it’s just for UK residents, but that’ll change as I sort out international postage.

The new podcast from me and Lizbeth Myles covers the history of SFF on TV, from 1953 onward, with our regular episodes (on the 14th of every month) covering a show released that year in the UK, and the Patron Bonus episodes (on the 28th) covering a show from the rest of the world. The shows for January are Out of the Unknown and Lost in Space/Marine Boy.

The main episode is available free wherever you get your podcasts. To get the bonus episode, you need to follow us on Patreon at £3/$3 or above. (And you get access to seven years of Hammer House of Podcast bonus episodes!) You can find all the info here.

You can now find all my social media links, my website/blog and links to where you can buy my books, in one place here, thanks to Linktree!

The great writer Samit Basu (also a former Clarion teacher) is starting an online writing workshop! Check it out here and see if it might suit you!

My great work excitement this week was seeing the final pages come in for Salvation’s Child by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the first book from my publishing imprint, Cosmic Lighthouse. Seeing this art team, Mike, Pippa and Simon, work together to produce this amazing graphic novel has been a delight, and I’ve taken great pride in encouraging them. As it stands, we’re just getting notes together after the final read-through, then after those have been actioned, off it goes to the designer, Dylan, for final assembly. I can’t wait until you all get to see it in June.

It was Thomas’ Annual Review this week, where Caroline and I talk to a couple of his teachers (usually the SENCO, the teacher concerned with Special Needs) about his progress during the year, and discuss which items on his care plan need to be updated because those goals have been achieved and new ones should be set. This year, the teachers were as wonderful as always (he’s at such a good specialist school for autistic kids) but, and this burdened me a bit, everything on his care plan was ongoing, and he hadn’t hit any of the goals. They seem to have morphed into life aims more than goals that can be achieved within a year, things like completing tasks independently. I was left with the strong impression that in certain areas, he may be making only incremental progress, that maybe even this is who he is from now on.

There’s nobody to blame for this. It’s one of those things that’s just true. I very much intend to do everything in my power to boost his experience of the world and give him new vistas to enlarge him, but… at some point maybe I’ll just have to surrender to what’s real and stop mourning the child who doesn’t exist.

I’m worried, especially, about what happens to Thomas when Caroline and I die (of old age, I mean). We don’t have family nearby who could take on an adult with special needs, and he’s really only close to his Nanny, Louise, who can hardly be expected to suddenly become a full-time carer. Is he going to be independent enough by that point? It haunts me, in the early hours when I wake up, the idea of him alone and defenceless. It’s not quite a real picture, I can see that, there are so many caveats, and yet… it’s the extreme version of something I suspect most parents feel. What happens when it’s just Thomas?

On a much less existential scale, I’d also like to see what can be done about getting him into coding, which is a prospect that seems to have receeded at the school - or it’s going to arrive later, it’s hard to get past a teacher’s viewpoint of dealing with and talking about what’s happening now - so I’m looking into independent options for that. I’m also moving toward Caroline and I creating a trust for him in our wills, so his finances as an adult can be managed by people we trust.

Still, on the positive side, his Grandparents, who see him every few weeks, say his communication skills have leapt up, and the school reports his reading has too. ‘You like books and I don’t’ he said to me the other day, crushingly. How to get children interested in reading is a universal problem, but how to get one interested to whom it’s an effort to understand the printed page… It’s hard for Caroline and I to see he’s growing, because we’re too close to the tiny changes to see them and because at home he’s able to use a shorthand form of communication and relax rather than be challenged.

In the middle of the night when I get up to go to the toilet I put my ear to the door of his room and listen to him breathing, just to be sure he’s still in there. All ongoing. All what my life’s about, really.

Announcements soon, but I can’t keep saying they’re coming! Soon!

And I hope to see you all here next week!