Paperback Picnic is on hiatus

You may have noticed that posts from this newsletter have become sporadic over the past year, and dried up completely in the past two months. Rather than letting it fade away quietly as so many blogs and newsletters do, I want to let you know "officially" that I don't think I can put out posts on a regular schedule for the foreseeable future.

The reasons for this are pretty simple. My daughter was born, then my partner and I both went back to work, then my novel was published. House of the Rain King has been selling really well (by the standards of a debut self-published author, anyway) and people are starting to say things like "When is the next one coming out?"

As a result, my list of priorities has ended up as: childcare, work, write the next novel, organise a print run of the first novel, write Paperback Picnic. In that order. And it seems to be a fact of life that whenever you write a list of priorities, the last thing on the list just doesn't get done.

Besides this, I've become a bit wearied by the whole premise of the blog. I have a huge pile of trashy paperbacks that I've picked up from charity shops, but when I look at them I no longer feel excited by their lurid covers. They just look like work.

So I'm taking a break. This doesn't mean there definitely won't be any posts, but you shouldn't expect them on any kind of schedule.

To the people who subscribed recently (I assume many of you came here after reading House of the Rain King) I apologise that this is the first email you receive from me. To make it up to you, here are some of my favourite posts from the archives:

• "The First Secondary World", an investigation into the surprisingly recent origins of secondary worlds in fiction
• My review of the rare Aboriginal fantasy novel The Kadaitcha Sung
• My review of The Wizards and the Warriors, a genuine lost classic

I hope to come back around to this blog in some form, when the time is right. Until then, I hope you all find books to read that excite and surprise you.