I sent out a newsletter yesterday, which includes a free short story called The Artisan Dreamer. If you want to read it, all you have to do is subscribe to the newsletter, by going to http://eepurl.com/_5EDX . You'll also get to read all the previous stories for subscribers. (Full disclosure: some of them are available in Racing the Storm and Other Stories, though they were exclusive to subscribers when I included them in the newsletter.)

The Artisan Dreamer is set in the Elangic Empire, that semi-mythical civilisation that's part of the backdrop to The Schemes of Raltarn and Tomaz and the Dragonrider books. It's a vignette of one of the Empire's more unusual professions.

True to my word in last month's post, I haven't done anything with the audiobook of The Last Dragonrider this month. I wrote a couple of weird little pieces that might end up in a future collection, or might stay exclusive to open mic nights.

I returned to something that I started last year, while waiting for beta readers to come back with comments on The Last Dragonrider. It was going to be a short story, but has turned into a novella. (This is becoming a habit with me, isn't it? I'm hoping I can wrap it up before it's long enough to call a novel.) It's set in the same world as The Schemes of Raltarn and Tomaz and Dragonrider, but in a different country and a different time period. It doesn't have a proper title yet, only a probably-unsuitable working title, which is Dreams of Demons.

Apart from all that, I've contributed a story to Seaside Shuffle, an anthology of short writing about Blackpool. Mine is called The Misadventure of the Lion's Ear, and features a famous detective investigating a tragic accident in the basement of Blackpool's iconic Tower. The paperback will be on sale in August, and is available for pre-order now.

It's been a busy month, hasn't it?