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.

"The Hugo Awards are a set of awards given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year". That's the first sentence on their Wikipedia page (which illustrates the depth of my research: hey, I'm busy with meeting two book deadlines!).

This may sound a little off-piste, but stick with me.

Hey, sorry I've not posted one of these for a few weeks - I've been immersed in a new book, and barely paying attention to things like blogging, tweeting and Facebook. Which is kinda the point of this blog, actually.

So, it's the new year, and the weather's been lovely so we've had a few barbeques and dinner parties. At one of them, someone asked me whether being a writer was like in the movies, which she characterised as follows:

So, it's now 2015 - Happy New Year to you, reader! - and I'm reloading most of my CDs onto iTunes. Before you condemn this as some kind of new procrastination activity (now that I've deleted Minesweeper from my computer), I have valid reasons: I originally uploaded my CD collection on 128 bitrate which has led to some thin sounding reproduction when my ipod is hooked to the stereo, which (here's the clincher) annoys my good wife. I'm doing it for her. That's not procrastinating, not in the slightest...

It's THAT time of year: I finished the manuscript for Ascendant's Rite (Book Four of the Moontide Quartet), right on deadline day - 30th November 2014 - and sent it off to Jo Fletcher, my Publisher-Editor-Goddess. Job done . . . sort of. Now comes the waiting!

They say Art is never finished, just abandoned. I'd go along with that (he says, making the lofty inference that what he does is art!).

When I had just arrived in India in 2007, my plan was to complete a financial planning diploma, to try and stay current in financial services (though I'd just sent a manuscript to a publisher and didn't know it then but it was soon to be accepted and change my priorities). I was sitting at the computer one morning, my wife Kerry on whose ticket we were in India was at her office (which happened to be 100 yards away on the same compound), and I was checking the news before knuckling down to do some study.