So here's a discursive history of events leading up to "Dead Lies Dreaming", and then an explanation of my train-wreck of a schedule (and how I got mugged by an entirely unplanned book).

I've got a new book coming out next October 27th. And it's one I haven't said very much about, because it wasn't actually supposed to happen.

Let's rewind to the heady days of 2007. I'd had an epic six year breakthrough run, with about eight books coming out in a five year period, multiple consecutive Hugo nominations (and a win), and I was getting a handle on the whole writing-for-a-living thing. But I was also 43 years old, and feeling extremely burned out, because I peaked at three novels in one year and had been averaging two a year for the first half of the decade. It's possible to write more than that — a lot more — if you follow a formula, but I was trying to break ground, so every book had to be fresh and different. So I resolved to take a sabbatical, a six to nine month period in which I didn't need to write a novel or do anything except relax, process, and rebuild my creative energy. To make it work, I wrote a novella ("Palimpsest", which won a Hugo in 2010) and bolted it on top of a bunch of other short works to make a collection ("Wireless") which could be published in 2009. And then I tried to take a break —

Only my father got ill. By which I mean "emergency hospital admission, not expected to survive the night" kind of ill. He survived, and then he was in a coma for three weeks, and when he awakened he was hemilaterally paralysed, and after a month he began to get some movement back but wasn't expected to ever walk again, and then —

Well, not only did he walk again, he got to do lots of things again, and he lived another decade, which was good. But my carefully planned sabbatical was spent on hospital bedside visits and anxiety, although at least I got a break from writing.

Let's fast forward to 2017. My father got ill again that spring, and being 93, he didn't recover. I'd spent the year leading up to his death writing a draft of "Ghost Engine", a wide-screen space opera, but there is this thing about people dying: it taints any creative project you're emotionally invested in that you're working on at the time, and only distance will let you get your detachment back, and with it the ability to work on that project. (To this day, "Ghost Engine" is still waiting for me to get back to the paused second draft.) Because I had a deadline to hit and couldn't emotionally engage with the book I was supposed to hand in the month after he died, I negotiated a substitute: I knew what the ninth Laundry Files book was about a long time before I wrote it, so I squeezed out "The Labyrinth Index" in a hurry. And then I really burned out, and botched the third re-write of "Invisible Sun" so badly I came down with a case of writers' block. It was clearly time for another sabbatical, so I asked for a revised deadline and then took six months off.

Then my mother had two (or maybe three) strokes and went into hospital for three months, followed by most of a year hanging on in a specialist nursing home. She was 90.

While this was happening I should have been working on "Invisible Sun" or "Ghost Engine", both of which were scheduled and already way overdue. But not only was I burned out: I was spending about a third of my time traveling to and from the nursing home (and recovering from the visits). Even if you're not a front-line carer, dealing with a terminal illness in the immediate family is immensely draining. Also: I knew for a certainty that my mother was going to die at some point in the next couple of months, and it would poison whatever book I was working on at the time, all over again.

So I gave myself permission to go off-track and write whatever I felt like, in the hope that not having a deadline would give me room to at least write something, even if it was unsalable. Therapy writing, in other words.

Fast-forward to March 2019 and, to nobody's surprise, "Invisible Sun" and "Ghost Engine" weren't going anywhere ... but my mother was still alive, and meanwhile I had a new and wholly unexpected book with the working title "Lost Boys". (Which hastily got renamed "Dead Lies Dreaming" because the cult vampire movie "Lost Boys" got a streaming TV show make-over in 2019, and only an idiot goes up against a cult media property on Amazon/Google search.)

As of March 2019 I had been writing the Laundry Files for 20 years. Bob and the other protagonists have aged about 18 years in that time, and the world around them has changed enormously. Spies in 2019 do not mean what they meant in 1999. The political landscape in 2019 is different, and not in a good way, from 1999. "The Delirium Brief" and "The Labyrinth Index" attempted to keep the Laundry Files relevant, but it's a losing game. I really need to end the Laundry Files: I think they've got at most two books left to run

But while I don't want to go on writing about the Laundry, I have other stories to tell in the same setting.

"Dead Lies Dreaming" was never meant to exist. I was blowing off steam and doing therapy-writing for stress relief while dealing with unpleasant real-life stuff. But it does exist (and worse, so does the first half of the second book in the trilogy), and it's coming out on October 27th, from Orbit in the UK and Tor.com in the USA. They're calling it book 10 in the Laundry Files. Reader, "Dead Lies Dreaming" is not book 10 in the Laundry Files. The real book 10 hasn't been written yet (it's on my to-do list for 2020 or 2021: if I stick to current plans, it'll be the story of Mike Armstrong, the Senior Auditor).

There are no Bob and Mo in "Dead Lies Dreaming". Indeed, the only characters from the Laundry Files who show up are the Prime Minister (who makes a cameo appearance on TV), and a very confused Transnistrian Mafia Loss Adjuster. It is, in short, the start of a whole new series.

"Dead Lies Dreaming" focuses on ordinary life on the home front under the New Management: from the sprawling corporate empire of a billionaire hedge-fund oligarch and cultist, to a tumbledown squat occupied by a found family of art college dropouts and e-sports grifters, to a dream-quest through darkest 1889 Whitechapel in search of the long lost concordance to the true Necronomicon. There is not a single spy to be found in the entire book! There are supervillains, though: and cops and private-sector thief-takers, and a harried executive assistant; not to mention the entire book is as unremarkably gay as a very gay thing indeed (possibly even more so than "Rule 34").

This is not the Laundry Files. It's Laundry-adjacent, however, and it tackles the sort of social themes that a cumbersome government bureaucracy mired in paperclip audits and ISO9000 form-filling simply can't touch: crime and justice, deviance and conformism, life in a time of creeping and pervasive environmental crisis. (Magic. Magic everywhere, like rising sea levels and extreme weather events.) If you like it, there will be more of this sort of thing even after Bob, Mo, and the Laundry have sung their final encore and ridden off into the sunset. And as I said, it's already in production for publication at the end of October.

As for "Invisible Sun", it's top of my to-do list. Nothing is going to pre-empt it until I can shift it to the "out" tray. However, I can say with some certainty that it is not going to come out before 2021: I just hope nobody else dies before it's done. My editor David Hartwell, who commissioned the entire Merchant Princes series, died during the first draft. Then my father died right before I burned out on the third draft. Then my mother died while I was rewriting it for a fourth time. And now my wife is really worried ...