Hi all, Kerry and I are just back in Bangkok after a week in Manila, capital city of the Philippines. Kerry was visiting the office, and I played the tourist (as I hope to do to all the countries in her jurisdiction at some point during our tenure here (Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam at al, you’ve been warned)).

So, you start a series of books, and you’ve got a plan. Your pivotal events have been envisaged, and then carefully plotted to happen in a logical way. Revelations and twists all get sequenced in, and you try and imagine each scene from everyone’s point of view, so they work naturally.

Ascendant’s Rite is about to hit the bookshelves, completing The Moontide Quartet. As you can probably imagine I’m pretty excited by that, as well as lots of other emotions. Relief, to finally complete the series to the satisfaction of my publisher and editor, Jo Fletcher. And to meet my own very high expectations of what it should be. There were a hell of a lot of open threads by the end of Book Three, and I don’t think I was alone in wondering how I’d get them all tied up and resolved. Well, we got there, and did them justice too!

When I first started reading fantasy (and to a lesser extent sci-fi), I loved it, of course: the wonderful sense of being transported to another realm, the heroic challenges and the sense that anything was possible. But the initial books I read were very serious.

One of the unexpected (by me) side-effects of becoming a writer was that suddenly there were a few people out there who became interested in what I had to say about writing.

The first time we experience something, the more powerful it's effect on us. This is true of many things: new love, broken hearts, deaths, the first time we achieve something special for ourselves. I think it's also that way with books, or a piece of music or art.

Is it too late to revise New Year resolutions? Mine was to be regular with this blog, but because writing is fairly immersive, it's hard to pull my head out of whatever I'm working on to talk about something pertinent and relevant.

I always seem to start these blogs with an apology for tardiness, so let's skip that. Take it as written and read. These past few weeks I've been knee deep in the muck of the trenches, Western Front, 1916. I've spent so much time reading about the ghastly conditions the soldiers endured that my body went out in sympathy; I got ulcers, a sty in my right eye and a head cold. Fortunately no trench-foot, or lice, and no-one is laying artillery barrages on my house.

I had a good question from a reader recently, and being shy of a blog topic, latched onto it like a squid who's been bathing in super-glue. The question went like this:

Hi there! April was a heck of a month with four weekends out of town including ten days in Australia. Lovely time catching up with friends and family. As you can imagine, not so much writing time, but I'm back in Auckland now, feet under desk, ready to work.