Well, yesterday a big padded envelope arrived at my house with my advance copies of the hardback edition of Warrior Princess 2: Destiny’s Path. So now I know for sure that the book really does exist out there in the real world, rather than only on my computer!

I’m hoping to get the time to read it through soon. You know, what with all the trans-Atlantic editing and tinkering and rewriting that goes on, I only actually get to read the book cover-to-cover once it’s in print! So I have my fingers crossed that it’s good. I do know it has one of my all-time favourite characters in it. She’s Blodwedd the Owl-Girl. She was sent by one of the Old Gods - The Shining Ones - to be a guide to the hero Branwen. Thing is she used to be an owl. In fact, to explain it properly, she still is an owl, but she looks like a young woman. This proves tricky for everyone. I’ll give you a small example - owls sleep standing up - so Blodwedd doesn’t know how to sleep as a human. Plus, owls don’t chew when they eat. They rip bits off and swallow them whole, or they just chug small animals down as one solid chunk. So Blodwedd doesn’t even know how to eat - imagine trying to swallow a mouse whole and you get an idea of the practical problems she encounters. Plus she thinks like an owl - which is a deadly predator without any sympathy or compassion. Like I said, things are tricky with her in the mix!

Anyway, copies of the book should be hitting the stores in a few days now, so if your local bookstore doesn’t have it on the shelves, and you’d like to buy it, ask them to order it for you, why not?

On other issues, I’ve got the UK editorial suggestions back for The Faerie Path 6. I haven’t looked at them yet, because I’m in the middle of writing the 6th Sundered Lands book. Have any of you taken a look at the Sundered Lands pages? The covers are really great, I think, done by an artist who specializes in fantasy and sci-fi. The books are for a younger age group than The Faerie Path or Warrior Princess, so maybe they’d be good for younger brothers or sister or cousins or whatever?

Oh, and its suddenly gotten really wintery here in England. Not snowy at all yet, but with a cold north wind and grey skies and falling leaves. But on the bright side, this is exactly the time of year that I like to check out The Lord of The Rings. I have just bought myself the Audio CD version, which I’m listening to on an iPod kind of thing called a Sanza Fuse. Frodo has just arrived in Rivendell. When I was a teenager, I constructed a fake window on the wall in my bedroom and did a painting of Rivendell in it so it was like I had a magic window that looked out into Middle Earth. Do any of you do crazy stuff like that, or is it just me?

Anyway, I’d better get back to work now. Keep those suggestions coming for people you’d like me to do sketches of - I’m hoping to have some time in December to get my pencils out and do some drawing.

Someone suggested to me that I might like to add a page to this site where people could post fan-fiction. What do you guys think of that idea?