The Never-ending Story

i finished chapter twenty-one of City of Secrets yesterday, which was supposed to be the last, but there's a whole lot more plot to come so I'm supposed to be spending this weekend writing the extra chapter 22. The last two novels I've written have had twenty-one chapters, which sort of feels right but the last time I ran over that (City of Stars) I ended up having to write THREE more. Hope that doesn't happen this time.

The German edition of The Falconer's Knot came this week - it's called Die Farben des Teufels, which means The Colours of the Devil, and has a completely different sort of cover: just a painting of a very handsome young cowled friar, by candlelight, with a big dagger for the T of Teufels. It's very striking.

Rhiannon's new book Bad Blood was launched on 8th with a nice little party at our agent's in London. The table was covered in black crow feathers and red flower petals - very spooky. Amanda Craig gave it a good review in the Times this morning.

I heard John Adams' new opera A Flowering Tree at the Barbican - great music but the libretto and story diabolically bad. Also Gotterdammerung from the Proms on Radio 3 - orchestra terrific but Siegfried missed his high note on the hunting call. I saw two programmes about Elvis and tried to record a third, which seems to have wrecked the DVD player. One was Young Elvis in Colour, which was an irrestibly accurate title. They might as well have called it Sex on a Stick. How absolutely drop dead gorgeous he was!

I read the last Harry Potter which was much more readable than expected, and two books by mates - Adele Geras' A Hidden Life (Orion), which is her best adult novel yet, I think, and A Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma, which was very grim in its subject matter and utterly convincing.