Sorry it's been quiet on the information front for a while, but my approach is only to tell you news on here when there is actually news to tell. And now there is!

The publication of Hero Born is now totally official, with Harper Voyager having issued a press release announcing the signing of me and 14 other new authors to their UK office. You can read it here on The Bookseller website.

As part of this, I have a new publication date. The e-Book will be published on 15th January, 2015, and will be able to be pre-ordered prior to then - I'll let you know as soon as I hear this is operational. I'm delighted with this date, as it gives reasonable time for Voyager to sculpt my scribblings into a masterpiece, and it also enables anyone not currently possessing a Kindle or one of the many other excellent e-readers to add one to their list for Santa. 

As far as I can see (though I am just grasping at wisps of information here) I will be the third of the Voyager UK authors to be published, with Jeff Pearce and Terry Newman having their books released in December, and the first of 2015... no pressure then!

The others in our authors' support group (see the last blog post) will be published in rapid succession over following months, so I'll keep you posted on those as they are coming up. In the meantime, though, I feel it would really support them all if my book proved to be a massive success to a previously unimagined and actually fairly impressive extent, so in the interest of helping others, I would urge you to spread the word about Hero Born and, when the time comes, help to get those ebooks flying off the virtual-reality shelves.

It's a funny, paradoxical thing, being a writer. You sit yourself down hoping to communicate to multitudes, but you do so in solitude. Whether you are alone in a quiet room, trying to find time in a family home or tapping away in the midst of a busy office, in reality it is just you and the screen or piece of paper before you. You have to zone out to get yourself on any sort of a roll... or at least I do. Because that's the other side of it: we all have our own ways of getting into that state where we can just batter it out, that feeling where the flow of words feels natural and easy. In other words, we are even individual at being, in our heads, alone.

But that doesn't mean we are hermits; it doesn't mean we like our own company all of the time. Which is why it has been a surprise and a delight to have come into contact with several of the other authors who have been signed by Harper Voyager through their open call. It started when I was sought out by A.F.E Smith, author of Darkhaven, and soon we had been joined by Bishop O'Connell (The Stolen), Katherine Harbour (Thorn Jack), Nancy Wallace (Among Wolves), Kelley Grant (The Sand Sifters), Ingrid Seymour (Ignite the Shadows), Lexie Dunne (Superheroes Anonymous), Jack Heckel (Once Upon a Rhyme), Sarah Remy (On Stonehill Downs) and Jason W LaPier (Unexpected Rain).

Links to their websites are on, funnily enough, the My Links page, and you really should visit every one of them - each of us is very different in our stories, but united in our storytelling. The websites are our public faces, our writing moments are our most individual of times, and somewhere in between is our wee new-Voyager-authors Facebook group where we swap news, ask and give advice, and generally just support each other. Because it is one of the most exciting things to be signed up by a major publisher, but one of the most daunting and nerve-wracking as well, and having a den for our gang - albeit a virtual one - makes for an invaluable place for us to go.

As writers, we all work alone... but, like our characters, we all need a band of merry men and women around us to keep us going.