I’ve just seen the preliminary sketches that artist Neil Roberts has done for the cover of my forthcoming novel, The Recollection. He’s produced three views of the story’s main spaceship in flight, and they look excellent.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s a strange and gratifying experience to see an artist render something that has hitherto existed only in your imagination.

I still have 30k words of the novel to write, and these pictures have certainly given me a boost.

Hot on the heels of the 2020 Visions announcement, comes confirmation that I’ve sold a story called ENTROPIC ANGEL to an anthology with the title of Dark Spires. This anthology is a sequel-of-sorts to last year’s Future Bristol, only this time the scope has widened to include the whole of the West Country.

The TOC for the 2020 VISIONS anthology has been announced:

1. Mary Robinette Kowal – Birthright
2. Shiela Finch – The Persistence of Butterflies
3. Randy Henderson – A Shelter for Living Things
4. Jason S. Ridler – Showing Light
5. Ernest Hogan – Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs
6. David Lee Summers – The Revelation of Thought
7. Jeff Spock – Teh Afterl1fe
8. Emily Devenport – If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies
9. Cat Rambo – Therapy Buddha
10. Jack Mangan – Dead Rookies
11. David Boop – Organ Cloning While You Wait
12. Spencer Ellsworth – The Black Plague of Our Generation
13. Gareth L. Powell – The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns
14. Alethea Kontis – Pocket Full of Posey
15. Alex Wilson – Nervewrecking
16. David Gerrold – Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists

Yesterday, I received word that I’d sold not one but two short stories, to different anthologies on the same day. I can’t tell you yet which anthologies they are, but I can tell you a little something about the stories:

1. ‘Entropic Angel’ is a quasi-supernatural Western set in Somerset in the near future, featuring angels, wind farms, crossbows and hair scrunchies – sort of like Pale Rider meets The Wicker Man.

2. ‘The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns’ is probably best described as a fantasy love story with an Elvis soundtrack. The day after I wrote it, I read the first draft aloud to a room full of students at Bath Spa University, as part of a lecture on creative writing. It  charts the course of the doomed affair between a disillusioned London photographer named Ed and Natalie, the smalltown diner waitress he meets on his way to visit a UFO crash site near the Welsh border.

Futher details of the books will follow as soon as the publishers give me the all-clear to announce them.

I’m delighted to tell you that I’ve just signed a novel contract with Solaris books, for a book due to be published in September 2011.

Here’s the official announcement from editor-in-chief, Jon Oliver:

I’m pleased to be able to announce that I have just commissioned a new SF novel from author Gareth L. Powell called The Recollection, due for release in September 2011 in the UK and US. Gareth is a brilliant new writer and I know that you’re going to blown away by his mix of SF, Space-Opera and contemporary fiction. This is a writer worth watching and we’re very proud to welcome him to the Solaris fold. Once we have a cover for Gareth’s title, we will of course let you all have a look.

I’m currently working on three books – two futher novels and a second short story collection.

Here are the blurbs:

Novel #2:

In modern-day London a small-time criminal falls in love with his brother’s wife. When a mysterious portal opens on a London Underground escalator, he finds he has to put aside his personal feelings in order to rescue the one man standing in the way of his happiness.

Meanwhile, four hundred years in the future, a disgraced daughter has one last chance to redeem herself in the eyes of her family. She must to travel to a remote planet and secure a cargo of precious pharmaceuticals — and the only thing standing in her way is her former lover, the ruthless employee of a rival trading firm.

Novel #3:

In a world where nuclear-powered Zeppelins encircle the globe and electronic ghosts stalk the living, a King lies dying and a half-brained stick fighter struggles to solve a deadly riddle in order to regain her stolen soul.

Short story collection #2:

From the radioactive wastes of Southern England to the vampire-haunted streets of Amsterdam; from the malls of West London to the blasted desolation of a ruined alien city; from a street protest in Paris to the final moments of the human race – these tales put a wicked spin on the world we think we know.

To find out more about any of these books, drop me a line.

But this article is only the latest in a seres of articles on genre writing. If you enjoyed it, you might also want to read:

• Five Books That Changed My World, feature article for SF Signal, June 2010
• The Future Is Now, Irish Times feature article about the appeal and literary purpose of science fiction, May 2010
• How To Write A Press Release. A guide for writers and publishers, first published in Focus magazine, Spring 2010 edition.
• What Does Happen Next? An article exploring the lessons I learned from my first book launch, first published in Focus magazine, Spring 2010 edition.

A few days ago, I made the following comment on Twitter:

Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time, you have to keep putting one word after another if you want to write a book.

Now author Colin Harvey has used it as the jumping off point to discuss his method for staying focussed while working on a novel.

A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole … When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

Read Colin’s full article here.

Mark Watson reviews the Shine anthology on the revamped Best SF website. He writes:

Gareth L. Powell and Aliette de Bodard – The Church Of Accelerated Redemption.
One of the things I’m liking about this anthology is that the stories have a much more international flavour than most SF, and here Powell and de Bodard set their story in France. There’s a background of a wave of labour strikes (a very old French tradition which I heartily endorse), and the protagonist is a woman working for an IT company who has a bugger of a boss who certainly isn’t into liberte, equalite and fraternite. She’s working for a new church, as per the title, who are using IT to offer redemption – and the story works well with the solid setting, exploring issues around AI and sentience, impact on society and on individuals. The cyber-terrorist she meets, and his two hench-emos add a bit of colour. My recommendation to the authors would be to tweak it a bit and to get a script written and get it touted around Hollywood.

Read the full review here.

Last week John DeNardo, the editor of SF Signal, asked me to write about the books that changed my life. The resulting article is now available to read on the website..

Click here to read ‘Five Books That Changed My World’.