I’ve not done one of these for a while, but sometimes it just nice to kick back and talk about some great things in the world. We don’t do that enough.

First up, while last weekend was difficult for personal reasons, I did manage to catch up on some reading and finished Kate Baucheral’s latest novel , the third in the excellent SimCavalier series. Spoilers alert, its fabulous. My review is the second slide.

Meanwhile, due to my difficult family weekend I missed out on a fascinating panel at LitCon online hosted by Joseph Carrabis discussing world building across several scifi-based genres with YA science fantasy author Claudia Blood; alt-history, steampunk, and scifi author Geoff Genge; speculative fiction author Theresa Halvorsen; action-adventure military scifi author C.G. Hatton; scifi author Fabrice Stephan; alt-history and dystopia author Liz Tuckwell; and Joseph Carrabis himself. Luckily it is available on Mr Carrabis’s YouTube channal, which is like my own but more interesting, for any perspective authors of interested readers to catch up with.

Finally, as I said last weekend was not one of the best I have ever experienced. There was plenty of good news along with bad however. And among this I received so delightful reviews for my own novel’s and short story collections.

I know posting my own reviews could be seen as a little sad, but, sometimes writing is screaming out into the void and just hoping that perhaps someone likes and appreciates your madness, because feedback of any kind is hard to get and sometimes that little lift you get from a nice unexpected review makes this whole nonsense seem worthwhile…

And finally, finally, we got our first review of Harvey Duckman Presents 7, and in keeping with the truly international draw of this series and the writers within it was from India. Which was a pleasant surprise… And oddly enough, in the strange interconnections of such things there is a story from way back in Harvey volume 3, written by some semi-literate Yorkshire or other, which stars old Harvey himself and is set in India, where Harvey had travelled to find new writers and is waylaid by Big Publishing’s hit men, and escaping his death due to a cat and a mysterious door, which is the creation myth of the Harvey Duckman series (rather than the more prosaic truth of the matter which was a bunch of writers drinking in a Teesside bar) … Which is why getting a review on Amazon India in particular made me smile.

And finally finally finally.

A good weekend to all , and my your choice of impossible sky gods go with you…