Today's a proper Book Birthday – the official release date of Guardians of Paradise. For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, it's two weeks earlier than originally scheduled. I shall celebrate letting my third book loose on the world in some way yet to be determined, probably involving alcohol.

And a reminder about other 'me stuff': anyone who is in the Midlands next Friday (the 10^th) might want to drop in to the Briar Rose Hotel, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham where I'll be the guest of the Birmingham SF Group. Doors open at 7.30pm for an 8pm start, and it's £4 for non-members (who, they tell me, would be most welcome).

Then there's the official launch and signing of Guardians, on the 2^nd of October at the little Green Dragon Bookshop in Alton, from 2pm to 3pm (and afterwards at the pub over the road).

 It's a busy month.

This week I'm concentrating on 'writing admin', including work on an essay and a book review I've been asked to write, and sending out a few short stories in the hopes of selling them.

I'm also taking the chance to revisit stories that need rework before they go to a magazine; like the novels, my short fiction gets critiqued, and I apply the results to the first draft. I say 'stories', but I've had to be picky; the two main pieces awaiting rework are both novellas, and I don't have time to do both of them justice. The one I've picked, 'The Ships of Aleph', is the easy option, as my critters only raised a few relatively minor points. It needs tweaking, but not major rewriting.

The first step is to re-read the piece, and I found myself enjoying this process. Okay, so I also found myself wincing at a few sentences, but overall it felt good to re-acquaint myself with that tale, and with the unusual gent who tells it.

Whether, once tweaked, 'The Ships of Aleph' will be good enough to see print is something a magazine editor gets to decide.

When I mentioned to a colleague at the current day-job (yes, I'm afraid I still need one of those to get by) that I'd finished the first draft of my current novel he asked whether the next stage was to send it to my editor. Well, no.

Getting the first draft down is, for me, the longest and hardest part of the process, but in some ways it's just the start. Next, I need to run what I've done past Tripod, my long-suffering and occasionally sarcastic writing group. They've been getting chunks of Bringer of Light to critique since January; they'll get the last quarter of the book this week, so they can critique it in time for our next meeting, in mid September.

Before Tripod see the first draft I do a quick read-through of the raw text and try to spot and fix any messy writing, minor inconsistencies or obvious typos - they're particularly good at spotting amusing typos. This is also my first 'out loud' read-through; the more chances I get to read the prose out, and to tinker as a result, the better the final result will be.

In an ideal world I'd wait until I'd received and digested my critters' feedback before I moved on to the next stage; sadly, the tight schedule I'm now on won't permit me that luxury.

I’m pleased (and somewhat relieved) to announce that I’ve finally finished the first draft of Bringer of Light. Right now I’m thinking that, except for a few minor issues, it’s pretty damn good and will hardly need any rework. In about a week’s time I’ll have changed my mind, and it’ll be the worst thing I ever wrote, requiring a complete rewrite before delivery. This is quite normal.

I'm taking a few days off, then revisiting some long-neglected short stories before coming back to the novel with a more balanced view.

Meanwhile, my advance copies of Guardians of Paradise arrived this week, which was a cause of much rejoicing. I still experience immense pleasure the first time I pick up a physical copy of one of my books.

Actually you'll continue to get rather less than that from me, as although the massive five chapter long, multiple viewpoint conflict is finally over in the first draft of Bringer of Light, there's still a couple of chapters' worth of resolution.

Given I'm still working on the first draft, it seems a little surreal to already be discussing the cover, but the publishing schedules currently have the book hitting the shelves in July next year. And so, I've been chatting to Nik Keevil, who has done some of my previous covers, about what I'd like on this one.

I'm very lucky to be consulted so closely about my covers; it's one of the many things I love about being published by Gollancz. I've pulled together some descriptive passages for the artist, and I'm tempted to share them, but I suspect that would be foolish at this early stage. All I'll say for now is that the scene that won't leave my head is of a dramatic event in space. I look forward to seeing what Nik makes of it.

Meanwhile, with Guardians of Paradise hitting the shops in less than a month, I'm poised (or possibly braced) for the reviews, but so far my Google alert for the phrase is mainly turning up un-related references to t-shirts and posters.

The Birmingham SF Group, an esteemed science fiction society which is nearly as old as I am, have kindly invited me along as their guest in September.

I'll be doing an interview and a reading from Guardians of Paradise on Friday the 10^th of September, at the Briar Rose Hotel, Bennetts Hill. The doors open at 7.30pm for an 8pm start, and non members are welcome, for £4 payable on the door.

Today isn't really a full book birthday, but it is the day Consorts of Heaven comes out in paperback. The paperback has a new cover, very similar to the old one except with (I think) better colouring and a nicer font for my name. (In contrast to my last imported image this one is tiny as I, ahem, copied it from somewhere beginning with 'A'. Note to self: must ask editor for proper jpg.)

 I'm celebrating by giving myself an evening off to go see 'Spamalot' with Beloved.

Although the climax of Bringer of Light might be exciting for the characters, it's turning into a bit of a death-march for the author. Between writing it and doing a temporary but full-time day-job I've not got a lot of brain left.

However, I am one of those writers who is lucky enough to be able to read fiction whilst writing it - even if I don't have time to read as much as I'd like to - so I thought I'd pass on some reading recommendations, both of them series.

Charles Stross's 'Merchant Princes' series is pleasingly hard to pigeonhole. I suppose you could call it political slipstream fantasy, if you had to apply a label. This is a series that does need to be read in one go, as it's a single story split over six books. It manages to combine page-turning adventure with sharp political and social insight: for example it applies a hard and painful dose of reality to the fictional trope of an adopted child turning out to be a princess. It's also less than complimentary about American foreign policy, but that's fine by me, as so am I.

Jasper Fforde's 'Thursday Next' series can be read as stand-alones. This is fortunate, as I find them rather like champagne truffles: rich and very moreish but liable to lead to upsets if you gobble the whole lot at once. If my first recommendation was hard to quantify, this one's impossible, so I won't try. I do love how Fforde makes me care about Thursday, and rail against the injustice visited upon her (even when she doesn’t remember it herself – he plays some interesting tricks with memory), whilst at the same time making me grin at his wit and marvel at his skill. Damn the man and his prodigious talent. I'm currently reading The Well of Lost Plots, which confirms my suspicion that the process of writing a novel has very little to do with the author him- or herself. Fforde's recent book Shades of Grey is actually SF, so I'll be looking out for that one.

Apologies, by the way, for the strange formatting issues on this blog. I use a mega-wide screen and so didn't realise that importing the picture of the new cover for Guardians of Paradise a few weeks ago had messed things up. I have resized the image, so hopefully the problem should be sorted now.

... I bring you the not-news that my next book title is also the name of a Guild in World of Warcraft. I haven't checked, but with a name like 'Guardians of Paradise' I'm guessing we're looking at light 'n' lawful types. Also from the virtual pages of google alerts, a hit for 'Principles of Angels' for a site which appears to be giving tips for how to improve your oral sex technique. No, since you ask, I did not click through.

Of course, if I was Joe Scalzi, then when I didn't have anything of massive import to say I'd post dramatic/impressive/witty pictures of weather/scenery/cats. Sadly, I'm not, but I do commend his blog to you.

Having gone on (at some length) about the writing process, I'm now at the stage of Bringer of Light where I'm abandoning some of those organisational crutches.

The questions in the 'questions' file have all been answered (or deferred until the next book...). It's been weeks since I've looked at the 'character' or 'reference' files, as anything I don't know about my cast or world is going to be one of those 'unknown unknowns' and will probably remain undiscovered until I start thinking about the rewrites. The 'outline' file, previously the repository of most of the unused plot, has itself become unused.

I still have the 'timeline' table open as I write, but that's mainly to refresh my memory on what happened leading up to this point. The remaining notes are all in my chapter files, currently scatter-gunnered across several separate chapters as I guess where they'll eventually be needed.

In some ways this is my favourite part of writing a first draft, when all that hard work pays off and I find out what really happens at the end (as opposed to what I thought was going to happen). In other ways it's one of the most nerve-wracking and dangerous times. Nerve-wracking because if the damn novel doesn't come together in a satisfying way then I'm going to have my work cut out to fix it before the delivery deadline; dangerous because in my eagerness to reach a resolution there's a risk I might in inadvertently miss something vital, or not give the climax of the story the space it deserves and end up with a final section that comes out rushed.

Of course, there is still a fair amount of plot to get through – I'd estimate between eight and ten chapters worth – and a lot can happen in that time.