Surviving An Apocalypse: Why the Amish will outlast us all...

When I was at university I lived on the extremely busy Cowgate in Edinburgh where all the bars and nightclubs are situated below the student housing and along the street, only two minutes from your door, is the even busier Grassmarket area with more bars. Because of that I got into a habit of wearing earplugs to bed. Apparently it's a habit you can't break even when you move back into a fairly quiet large village. So at who knows what time this morning I failed to hear the huge tree in my backgarden as it was pulled up from its roots in the 100 miles winds that were blasting through Central Scotland. It fell down metres from my bedroom window, and all the heating and electricity was knocked out by the wind too. But was I aware? Nope.

So... I woke up to a huge tree in the backgarden and no electricity and heating... had none all day. When the last storms tore through Scotland just before Christmas people were without electricity for three days in other areas so I was beginning to feel a little bit antsy. A huge part of my job is online so having no internet connection made me more restless than I liked. There was no television to check how bad the damage was elsewhere, no phone signal to phone the council or insurance about the tree... All I can say is thank god for books!

A pity I didn't have this one on my shelf...

It occurred to me when the electricity came back on that I will probably die within the first week of a bloody apocalypse from either ignorance or sheer boredom. I need to learn survival skills. 

Anyhoo, I'm back. So... updates. I have taken all of my novels off Smashwords earlier than I said I would because just the thought of them on there bothered me beyond belief (piracy issues for those not in the know) so they came down. That means they are down from all the other retailers (B&N etc) with the exception of Kobo who has still to take them off their site. And of course my books are always available on amazon. I've been looking into website design and a built-in ebook store so hopefully I'll have something up and running by Spring. 

In other news... *she winces apologetically* ... I'm putting the release date of Scorched Skies back to March 16th. I know, I'm terrible! Unfortunately, the series -which at present looks to be six books - has a lot of plot and world-building that subtly develops over the six books so I had to know exactly what happens in each book before I could attempt to write Scorched Skies. That means research and plotting is taking a little bit longer than expected. I just want book 2 to live up to everyone's expectations because Smokeless Fire, despite being a full-length novel, is really only an introduction to a much bigger, diverse and intricate world. There so much that Ari still doesn't know, so much to be revealed!
So if Scorched Skies is March 16th (*winces even more apologetically*) Sneak Thievery is pushed back to May. Now these are just rough release dates. If I feel Scorched Skies is coming along quicker than expected then I'll release it before then and so on with Sneak Thievery. For now, however, the release dates sit as March 16th and May 11th.

OK... now I best get a move on...


Sam x