… because I’m aware it’s been awfully quiet over here while I was working on the revisions to Hollow Empire. Those are safely in the hands of my editor at Tor and I am slowly feeling human again!  Turning a 300K behemoth into something a little more digestible was quite a task, but I’m really proud of the revised version and I hope you guys are going to love it.

In other news, City of Lies just made the shortlist for the Aurealis award for Best Fantasy Novel! For those of you outside the country, these are Australia’s major judged speculative fiction awards, and it is a huge honour to be on the list.

For US/Canada: pre-order now for 3 July release

For UK: pre-order now for 23 August release

The best thing about the shortlist is that it’s full of excellent writers and friends of mine (particular shoutout to my agent sister Devin Madson, whose We Ride the Storm was one of my favourite books of the year, and to the brilliant Maria Lewis, who’s slowly recruiting all members of my family as fans via her excellent The Witch Who Courted Death), so I’ll be happy whoever wins, but it’s an enormous privilege to be sitting by them.

The other major Australian spec fic awards are the Ditmars – these are our fan-voted awards (so sort of like the Australian Hugos). City of Lies is eligible to be nominated in the Best Novel category and since I’ve never done anything before this, I’m eligible in the Best New Talent category, so if you enjoyed the books or me generally, haha, you can nominate via this form. If you are going to Continuum this June, or you’re otherwise active in fandom, you’re eligible to nominate. Full rules here.

I am also finally organising my first newsletter, so if you’d like to hear (very occasional*) updates about what’s happening, you can sign up on the Contact page. I hope to be sending that out in the next couple of weeks so now’s a good time to get on the list.

Now, back to grinning like a wee idiot about this shortlist! 🙂

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* So occasional that it has not yet occurred even once… I won’t be regular spamming you is what I’m saying, no matter what my primary school nickname was.