The big news this month is that Seaside Shuffle is now on sale. It's an anthology of poems, stories and memories of the seaside town of Blackpool in England. Go here to buy your copy if you haven't already got one. We held an event at the Mirrie Dancer cafe in St Annes to promote it. A representative from Storytellers Inc, a local bookshop, brought some copies, and sold all of them. My contribution is called The Misadventure of the Lion's Ear, in which Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson investigate a tragic accident at the newly-opened Blackpool Tower. There's a video of me reading the story at this event, which you can find on my Facebook page.

I've come back to my new book, Dreams of Demons, and started filling in the holes that my critique group and I identified. I wrote about 6,000 words of it this month (that's a lot of holes!). It's now officially a novel, according to the length criteria for the Hugo and Nebula awards (more than 40,000 words). That's the third time a short story has turned into a book. Maybe I should stop pretending that I'm the one in charge here...

I posted a video of another reading to YouTube. This is ...apart from all the others, from my sci-fi collection Racing the Storm and Other Stories. The inventor of the worst programming language ever gets his ego boosted and crushed at the same time. I can neither confirm nor deny that I have a specific language in mind as "the worst ever".

Subscribers to my newsletter got another short story this month. The subject matter is something of a departure for me. A recent prompt at the Urban Arts Writers' Group was to create a newspaper article that was so startling as to be impossible to ignore. I was in a rather silly mood, and thought I'd take a figure of speech and imagine it was literally true. I wrote down a few, and picked the one that seemed most interesting. The result is called Money Talks... and Talks and Talks. If you'd like to read it, or any of the other newsletter exclusives, subscribe by going to http://eepurl.com/_5EDX.