Our pond on Friday. Thanks to Frank Kelly for pointing out that the trees look like three frosty trolls ...

Winter finally reached us on Friday last week, with a heavy fall of snow overnight.  I gather it's mostly melted down in the lowlands, but here on Dartmoor it's not going anywhere.  It's very picturesque, but the lanes around our house are all quite bad, so I think we may be stuck here till it thaws. At least we've sorted out the pipe from the borehole, which used to freeze every winter and leave us without water at the coldest times of year.  And the new studio is toasty warm with the woodburner ticking over, so I have no excuse to slack off. I've completed three projects so far this year - the text for the second of my OUP books with Sarah McIntyre (keep watching her blog for updates on the first, Oliver and the Seawigs) and a couple of short stories which I'll tell you about when the anthologies they were written for are published. I suspect that rate of productivity will tail off pretty sharply now...

Last night, as mentioned here previously, I did an AMA session on the Mortal Engines sub-Reddit.  I was a bit worried that nobody would log on, but quite a few people did, and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable interviews I've done: there were good questions about the books from all sorts of angles, and people could come back with further responses to my answers, so it was like half a dozen conversations going on at once. I hope I didn't miss any of the questions: I'll check in a moment in case I did.  You can read it all here, but because of the way Reddit operates, with people voting things up and down, it's all got cut up and rearranged in the manner popularised by William Burroughs, with some of my replies appearing long before the question to which they relate...  maybe that makes for a more interesting read, though.

Finally, thanks to everybody who shared or re-Tweeted my posts last year about Mossy Hare Productions, and all who contributed to their quest to fund their documentary about the making of John Boorman's Excalibur.  They raised very nearly two thirds of the $30,000 they were aiming for, which will enable them to at least start the post-production work.   I look forward to blogging my report from the star-studded Dublin premiere in due course.