Over on the very cool The Steampunk Home blog I’ve got a short guest-post and an exclusive excerpt from The Bookman, about – and taking place in – the now-gone Egyptian Hall, which used to stand in Piccadilly.

Everyone has their own secret London. Mine includes Davenports’, the magic shop in the bowels of Charing Cross Station; Simpson’s on the Strand, the restaurant Sherlock Holmes used to dine in; the Red Lion Pub in Soho, where Karl Marx used to drink and above which he worked on Das Kapital; the ancient, hidden Nell Gwynne pub behind the Adelphi Theatre, and others. The Egyptian Hall, sadly, is no longer there. Built in 1812, it was a mock-Egyptian structure in Piccadilly that, over the Victorian era, played host to any number of strange exhibitions – including automatons, freak-shows and magic. The Mechanical Turk, that legendary chess-playing machine, exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Some of the first moving pictures were shown there. And the British family of magicians, the Maskelynes, have taken it over, when it was known as England’s Home of Mystery.

What better place, then, to feature in my very own steampunk story? Indeed, how could I possibly resist? – Read the rest of the post and excerpt!

I got to take part in the Advent Book Blog recently, where different people recommend favourite books from the past year. My pick was Will Elliot’s The Pilo Family Circus. Great book.

I have a new guest-post over at Daily Steampunk: From HebrewPunk to Steampunk, where I talk a little about writing The Bookman, and the book that never was.

The truth is, I didn’t initially set out to write a steampunk novel. I set out to write an ambitious, secondary-world fantasy trilogy that was, like HebrewPunk, based on Jewish – rather then Western European, or Celtic, or Nordic – mythology. Like HebrewPunk, I thought it would have dybbuks in it – and golems – and kabbalists. It would also have chases, and adventures, and a quest of some sort. It would have been great…

Only, somewhat to my surprise, it sucked.

It wasn’t the Jewish element, of course. To a large extent, it was me. I was trying to take on too much – too soon – and to do it, moreover, without joy. I didn’t enjoy it. and if the writer doesn’t enjoy the book they are writing, why expect the readers to? – read the rest of the post.

Angry Robot are offering a free sample from The Bookman.

Or you can download it directly in epub, mobipocket, or PDF.

While I tend to keep this site for more publications-related news, I’ve been doing some guest-blogging recently – and with a few more lined up for the next couple of months, at least. So I’ll try and post links when they’re up, the most recent being:

• At The Forefront of Madness – over at Jeff Vandermeer’s Ecstatic Days blog
• Editorial: Who Will you Invite to the World Fantasy Convention? – over at the World SF News Blog

SF Signal have now posted all five excerpts from my forthcoming novel, The Bookman.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

SF Signal have posted Chapter 2 of The Bookman (the one with the big explosion).

Who was Orphan and how had he come to inhabit that great city, the Capital of the Everlasting Empire, the seat of the royal family, the ancestral home of Les Lézards? His father was a Vespuccian sailor, his mother an enigma: both were dead, and had been so for many years. His skin was copper-red, his eyes green like the sea. He had spent his early life on the docks, running errands between the feet of sailors, a minute employee of the East India Company. His knowledge of languages was haphazard if wide, his education colourful and colloquial, his circle of friends and acquaintances far-ranging if odd. – read the rest of the chapter.

Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon have announced the final table of contents for their upcoming Dark Faith anthology, to be published by Apex Books in 2010. It includes my story “To The Jerusalem Crater”, and many more besides:

Dark Faith Table of Contents:

Poem: “The Story of Belief-Non” by Linda Addison
“Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland
“I Sing a New Psalm” by Brian Keene
“He Who Would Not Bow” by Wrath James White
“Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation” by Douglas F. Warrick
“Go and Tell It on the Mountain” by Kyle S. Johnson
“Different from Other Nights” by Eliyanna Kaiser
Poem: “Lilith” by Rain Graves
“The Last Words of Dutch Schultz Jesus Christ” by Nick Mamatas
“To the Jerusalem Crater” by Lavie Tidhar
“Chimeras & Grotesqueries” by Matt Cardin
“You Dream” by Ekaterina Sedia
“Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes” by Jay Lake
“The Mad Eyes of the Heron King” by Richard Dansky
“Paint Box, Puzzle Box” by DT Friedman
“A Loss For Words” by John C. Hay
“Scrawl” by Tom Piccirilli
Poem: “C{her}ry Carvings” by Jennifer Baumgartner
“Good Enough” by Kelli Dunlap
“First Communion” by Geoffrey Girard
“The God of Last Moments” by Alethea Kontis
“Ring Road” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Unremembered” by Chesya Burke
Poem: “Desperata” by Lon Prater
“The Choir” by Lucien Soulban
“Days of Flaming Motor Cycles” by Catherynne M. Valente
“Miz Ruthie Pays Her Respects” by Lucy A. Snyder
Poem: “Paranoia” by Kurt Dinan
“Hush” by Kelly Barnhill
“Sandboys” by Richard Wright
“In Abstentia” by Gary A. Braunbeck

Phantom, an anthology of “literary horror” edited by Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay, is now available on Amazon and in shops in general. I just came across the Library Journal review, which says:

The most outstanding piece is Lavie Tidhar’s “Set Down This,” a devastating story of YouTube videos, the Iraq War and the unknown lives on both sides of the conflict.

Nice!

SF Signal are posting a 5-part excerpt from The Bookman, beginning with Chapter One. It’s a strange feeling indeed, seeing it out there… and as Isabella Beeton says, in the words prefacing the book:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it.