The reason for the lack of significant blogging for the past couple of months is that I've been grappling with a manuscript. Grappling is now mostly done: it needs some more polishing before I hand it in, but at least it's a book-shaped object at this point, rather than a nervous breakdown in motion. And some time next year it'll be published under the cover above.

I feel the need to apologize at this point: to you (at least, if you're a fan), and to my editors. This is the first time I've gone overdue on a deadline. I've sometimes had to ask for an extension, but I always do that well before there's any risk of disrupting other folks' schedules. This time ... well, it's a first, and not a pleasant one, and there's a risk that the publication date will slip back a couple of months as a result.

To be honest, this wasn't the book I expected to write and hand in this year. That was going to be a space opera, "Ghost Engine", which I've been working on since mid-2016. However, while I was reworking "Ghost Engine" this summer, my father became ill and, shortly after his 93rd birthday, he died. Without going into too much detail about the interior of my own head, I felt unable to continue at that time: so this autumn I started work (late) on a different novel, "The Labyrinth Index", on the theory that at least the Laundry Files are a familiar (known) quantity. Then I got ill, which cost me a few weeks and, well, the result is a deadline missed by several more weeks.

But anyway. "The Labyrinth Index" exists. Better (a little) late than never: it'll be with my editors in a few weeks and will come out in 2018. (It might even come out on schedule, if we're lucky.) And "Ghost Engine" will be a lot easier to rework with a 6-9 month time-out after summer's heavy emotional turbulence.

As for blogging: all my blogging energy has been going into the novel for a while now. But I'm going to try and pull my shit together and give you something new in the next few days.