Right. A new year, a new book, a new blog, a new web site for Shoto Press--everything is new again! As you can see, a lot has been retooled around here, vastly for the better, as far as I'm concerned.

This new blog is a tabula rasa. The only reason to keep the old stuff up was so I could boast that I was one of the first bloggers (my first post all the way back in 2001 even had to define "blog" since it was such a new term), but most of it was rubbish, so I've started afresh. There are some pieces I genuinely liked and was proud of, and which, I hope, have withstood at least a few of the ravages of time. And some (like "Sharky's Machine" or "Good old Garuda" or the account of mischief my niece and I got up to in "Bruce Jones, the Dead Damn Rat, and other pranks") are just so absurd that I had a good time writing them, and so they have been preserved. All the old posts that can make the cut, I'm excavating, and will periodically link up on the left. The rest all looks forward. 2007 is as good a starting point as any. (I've always done better in odd-numbered years, something I'm trying my best to keep from hardening into a full-blown superstition, but 2006, unfortunately, did little to unseat the pattern.)

Where have I been? There's that famous adage (John Lennon, I believe) that goes, "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." So I've been living, give or take, dealing with this and that, and I've been writing. Writers do that; we vanish for periods while we write and/or attend to the various tribulations we get caught up in that fall under the general rubric of Life, and then we reappear when we have something to show for it.

And occasionally when we don't, but more often, at least in the case of this writer, the former. Encountering us in either state guarantees that you'll get your ear chewed off about what we're working on now, or some seemingly brilliant idea we just had that we simply must tell you about right away before it goes (and how are you, by the way?), so be careful of people like us.

You'll be seeing the (distilled) fruits of my labors of the last couple of years here before you see them anywhere else. In fact, I can show off the first of them right now: the third Malay Mysteries book, Island of Glass and Ashes, is now available to order through this site, and will soon be appearing in book stores and in Diamond's Previews, if that's where you'd prefer to get it (I'll post details on when everyone will have the book in stock as I get them).

In an upcoming post, I'll talk a bit more about Island--quite a lot went into creating it--and the fourth book in the series, Sita's Shadow and Other Stories. There's lots of other stuff going on in the world of my projects besides the Malay Mysteries, but lots of time to get into all that later.

For now, welcome to the new Shoto Press site (feel free to poke around), and my new blog, where I promise to go on and on just as tediously as I did on the first one, so much so that you'll never miss the original, and I can aggregate another few years of musings before tearing it down and starting something new, this time without, perhaps, leaving it to lie fallow for a year before deciding to soldier on. Check out Island of Glass and Ashes, give yourself an excuse to reread Garlands of Moonlight and The Ghost of Silver Cliff, and happy 2007.

I think it's going to be a good year.