Ah yes, another colossal abyss of time has passed me by - by gum, we`re into June already! My only real excuse is that I`ve been writing furiously away like a tankerfull of Trojan bees on Shadowmasque which, gratifyingly, has turned up several unexpected writerly delights. Sans details, all I can say is that this kind of creative discovery is a natural part of the process, and one of the main joys of it. Hopefully, my readership will think so too.

The short story collection, Iron Mosaic, is now available from Immanion Press directly (see the link at the home page of this site) and from Amazon. I`ve had one of me author copies through and my editor, Gabby, tells me that a whole bunch of review copies are currently winging their way across the country, and even the Atlantic. Hmm, nice!

As many of you might know, we`ve got some elections coming in the UK on June 10th - many people will be using them to register their opinions of the Blair government, particularly with regard to the Iraq imbroglio; many others will not be bothering to vote at all, seeing as how they got much more important things to do like watching Eastenders or Big Brother, or playing games on their mobile phones...

Personally I`ll be voting against the current Govmt - our involvement in the Iraq invasion has been nothing short of a disaster, and the emerging awfulness of the abuse and torture is truly horrific. To think that we as a nation thought that we had finally shaken off the dark shadow of our colonial past only to find ourselves again hip-deep in the brutality and injustice of occupation is dreadful beyond belief. I dearly hope that there will be a starkly blunt message to the Blair government from the June 10 ballot, but I fear that they will just ignore it and go on as before (and you have to ask why it is that Geoff Hoon still has his job - the man has bungled the job completely).

Anyway, I know you`ll excuse these politico rants of mine - well, at least I keep `em clean!

I`m away on a busmans holiday this Friday for a few days stopover seeing friends in Kishinev in Moldova (sits between Ukraine and Romania), and shall be writing while I`m away. I shall see if I can log on for a blog while I`m there. In the meantime, be careful out there!

ciao - Mike