Last week I finished polishing the first draft of Maker’s Curse and sent it off to my lovely beta readers. I have a couple of weeks to catch up on a few matters before tackling their corrections. That includes a few announcements, and making some plans for this website.

First, the announcements.

Once again, I’ll be going to Speculate, a speculative fiction writers festival here in Melbourne, on the 16th of March. Last year’s inaugural festival was fantastic and I’m looking forward to taking part again.

And I’ve been invited to Pyrkon in May 2020. That’s the release month of Maker’s Curse in english and it’s very likely to be out a few other languages as well, so I’ll probably also do some appearances in other countries in Europe during the same trip.

Now the plans:

Orbit passed full responsibility of this website back to me in the middle of last year. I’ve always been in control of and paid for the hosting, and composed the blog posts, but for a while they did the design and most of the updating like adding book covers and such.

What with social media being the first place people seek information these days, I have wondered if this site is redundant now and I should delete it. I had to shut down comments ages ago because I was getting an overwhelming amount of spam comments, and once GDPR came in I removed all forms and today I removed all past blog posts. Since I didn’t design the site and couldn’t find out if it is GDPR compliant, it’s going to have to be replaced and I don’t have time to do it right now.

However, having a website does have two big plusses for visitors: it has (as far as I can tell) no ads, and you don’t have to sign up to anything to access it. It’s handy for me, too, as it’s easier and faster to answer common questions by giving someone a link to a FAQ page, and I can provide up-to-date publicity information.

So when the editing of Maker’s Curse is done, I will be replacing the current site with something new. Maybe something very basic, maybe a whole blog, but something new.