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 these links on BlueSky and 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!

There’s a new project to crowdfund audio comedy series, and one of the first adopters is Eddie Robson, creator of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 sitcom Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully. His new fantasy comedy, The Least Bad of All Possible Worlds, is being funded right now and sounds great. Go check it out.

And talking of great comedy writers, David Quantick’s touching and typically humane new book Imagine a Friend is now up for pre-order at the publisher’s site here.

Well, neither me or my friends won those awards we were nominated for, but that’s how it goes. It’s been another good week otherwise. I’m still putting in word count on the official sequel, and my dialogue on that first comic issue has been approved. Plus one big thing that was a possibility is now definitely going to happen.

Thomas raised my hopes this week by saying a tentative ‘yes’ to me reading to him (from Space Band by Tom Fletcher), but when I mentioned it again said he’d changed his mind and that ‘you like reading, I don’t’, which is pretty heartbreaking. Given his autistic nature, though, I know over-reacting would make things worse, so I just nodded. I need to find a way to try again. I’ve added swimming and drumming to his world, and surely I can do the same with reading for pleasure? (He can read absolutely fine, but his comprehension is really low, and I think that’s what stops him from enjoying it.)

There was also an incident with one of my favourite online comic stores (I’ll name them, The Unreality Store, because I think this reflects well on them). They were having a half-price sale, so I swooped in on a Captain Marvel that was a bargain at that price, and some Invisibles that were on my wants list. When the order shipped, however, I saw the former wasn’t in it, and that I was only paying for the latter. Early in the morning, and being a bit passive/aggressive, I emailed them saying I’d only made the order because of the CM and asking what had happened. They replied saying they’d discovered the comic had the centre pages missing and so didn’t feel able to sell it as described. They also said they’d refund the whole order and I could keep the other comics when they arrived. I replied saying no, that’s fair enough on your part, I’m happy to pay for the other comics, but they insisted and went ahead and refunded the order. Sure enough, the other comics arrived, with, as the Store sometimes does, a couple of random free issues thrown in. I was left feeling very guilty, because, especially with the world in the economic state it is now, I believe in paying my way, and I know comic stores are hardly raking it in. Plus, my early morning self had been, in a moment, venal and annoyed for what turned out to be no good reason. I made a couple of other attempts to say please charge me, but all were resisted. I finally bought one of the store’s gift vouchers and will never use it. Phew. But isn’t it lovely right now that here’s a customer and a supplier both bending over backwards to be more than fair to each other? Do take a look at the Store’s site, there’s some lovely stuff there if you’re a comics or role-playing games fan.

Maybe not next week, maybe not the week after, but soon now, two very big announcements!

And I hope to see you all here next week!