Well, the new website is more or less up and running, insofar as it sits, like a beached whale, waiting for me to shunt it back into the sea [with a pat on its rump for good measure]. Came back from holiday to good news yesterday, with my thriller, The 52, going to auction in France. Editions First were the eventual winners, and I’m eagerly looking forward to what they are going to make of it. The French market is a notoriously difficult one to crack for any author - particularly a foreign one who insists on writing about France - and so I am taking the fact of the auction as proof that maybe I’ve got something right! Alongside the French news came the news that the Japanese publishing house Shincosha have also bought translation rights - that takes the number of foreign rights sales to 11 so far, which is extremely encouraging in terms of writing a follow-up thriller. Anyway, I’ll end now, with this first blog [or whatever one calls it] acting by way of a test [I have a secret suspicion that when I hit the publish button, the whole thing will disappear into the ether, re-emerging in someone else's website altogether]. All the best to all you phantoms out there…