Phoenix news!

Major announcement: the artwork for my new book Phoenix is now complete!  Dave McKean, who also illustrated the Varjak Paw books, has been working round the clock, and this week, he finished all the interior artwork, plus the cover!  I'm going to be sharing some of his incredible images with you in the lead-up to publication in August - but I'm going to start by sharing some of the images I gave him for inspiration while he was working on it.

The biggest thing I gave him was a beautiful book of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  Phoenix is set in space, across an entire galaxy.  It starts with a boy dreaming that the stars are singing to him...

... and in the course of the story, he meets Aliens who believe that the stars are in terrible danger.  Together, they must find a way to save the galaxy!  

The Hubble has produced some of the most detailed and astounding images ever made of stars, galaxies, nebulae...

I looked at these images a lot when writing, and was glad to learn that Dave also finds them very inspiring!

For more information on space and the stars, the NASA website is always worth a visit.  And for more Phoenix news, come back soon... I'll be posting lots more about it between now and August!

SF Said's new blog

People sometimes ask me what I've been doing since I wrote The Outlaw Varjak Paw, all those years ago.

The short answer is that I've been writing a new book called PHOENIX.  This one's not about Varjak Paw; it's not even about cats.  It's about people this time, and also aliens, because it's an epic space adventure set across a whole Galaxy.  It took me nearly 7 years to finish it, but it was worth every minute, because I think it's the best thing I've written yet.  Dave McKean is working on the illustrations right now, and it'll be published next year.

I'm going to be telling you all about it in this blog, as well as giving you news on various Varjak Paw events, and sharing some of my interests and inspirations with you.  I'm looking forward to it!

In the meantime, here's one of the images I just showed to Dave. It's one I looked at a lot while writing PHOENIX. Click on the picture to see it large!