OK, folks, just a quick one: yours truly is about to move house again, clambering down the country’s backbone and returning to the dubious but familiar bosom of this blog’s namesake, Velcro City.

Problem being that I’ve not yet managed to nail down a new place to live on a permanent basis. Luckily, Velcro City is full of good friends, so I’ve places to stay in the interim… but the backswing of the situation is that access to the intermatubes is going to be a little patchy for the next week, and quite possibly scarce for a few weeks following that. Which won’t make a huge difference to the admittedly patchy blogging schedule here, of course, though it’ll be more noticeable over at Futurismic (where I’ve scheduled a similar announcement for later today).

For those readers among you with whom my relationship has elements of business included, an email will be forthcoming later today explaining what’s going on.

For those readers among you wondering about where I might be found in terms of public events in meatspace: I’ll not be at Eastercon this year (have to do the final paperwork/handover stuff on this flat that weekend), but if you’re at the Clarke Awards ceremony on the 27th of this month, you’ve got a very good chance of bumping into me there.

And before I drop the shutters here for a brief period, I’ll take the opportunity to re-crow yesterday’s excellent news: I placed an essay with the Culture Lab blog at New Scientist, and I am pretty bloody stoked about it, thankyouverymuch. This year is shaping up to be full of exciting changes in my life, of which this is – I hope – just one early harbinger.

So watch this space.

Via the Double-Boing, Ed Yong of Discover‘s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog presents a graphical representation of his writing process, which is so incredibly similar to my own experience of writing reviews and essays that it’s almost scary… right down to the querulous “maybe pissing around on the internet would help?” (It never has yet, but I refuse to deny it the chance.)

From the NewCon Press press release that just hit my inbox:

Fables from the Fountain (ed. Ian Whates) is a volume of all original stories written as homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, featuring many of today’s top genre writers…

… and some other guy with a silly name. How’d he sneak in there? Item five in the TOC, look:

The Fountain, a traditional London pub situated in Holborn, just off Chancery Lane, where Michael, the landlord, serves excellent real ales and dodgy ploughman’s, ably assisted by barmaids Sally and Bogna (from Poland).

The Fountain, in whose Paradise bar a group of friends – scientists, writers and genre fans – meet regularly on a Tuesday night to swap anecdotes, reveal wondrous events from their past, tell tall tales, talk of classified invention and, maybe, just maybe, save the world…

1. Introduction – Peter Weston
2. No Smoke without Fire – Ian Whates
3. Transients – Stephen Baxter
4. Forever Blowing Bubbles – Ian Watson
5. On the Messdecks of Madness – Paul Graham Raven
6. The Story Bug – James Lovegrove
7. And Weep Like Alexander – Neil Gaiman
8. The Ghost in the Machine – Colin Bruce
9. The Hidden Depths of Bogna – Liz Williams
10. A Bird in Hand – Charles Stross
11. In Pursuit of the Chuchunaa – Eric Brown
12. The Cyberseeds – Steve Longworth
13. Feathers of the Dinosaur – Henry Gee
14. Book Wurms – Andy West
15. The Pocklington Poltergeist – David Langford
16. The Last Man in Space – Andrew J Wilson
17. A Multiplicity of Phaedra Lament – Peter Crowther
18. The Girl With the White Ant Tattoo – Tom Hunter
19. The 9,000,000,001st Name of God – Adam Roberts
20. About the Authors

Yup, that’s actually a real story by me. In a real book. Alongside writers who… well, just look at that list.

Holy shit.

(Yeah, I’ve known about this for a while, but it’s still crazy as hell seeing it in real words.)

Anyway, don’t let my presence in that TOC put you off, because this is for a Good Cause:

2011 marks the 25^th Anniversary of the Arthur C Clarke Award.  This volume is produced in part to raise funds for the Award, which lost its sponsor last year due to the closure of Sir Arthur’s publishing company. The book will be released May 2011.

Available as an A5 paperback or a dust-jacketed hardback, limited to just 200 copies, each individually numbered and signed by all the authors. Cover art by Dean Harkness.

Price: Paperback, £9.99; Signed Limited Hardback, £29.99

The NewCon Press site is currently offline pending the resolution of some rather troublesome domain registration SNAFU, but I’m told you should be able to pre-order Fables… from Amazon in the fairly near future. More details as I get ‘em.

Holy shit.