Here's the clipping of my nice review from yesterday's Guardian. It's not online yet, so I thought I'd post this. I'm really chuffed with the reception Hell's Belles is getting - in the press and on people's blogs. We need more copies in shops though. C'mon Waterstones. And stop just putting it in the SF section of the shop!

Quiet Sunday here after a nice, long, pretty raucous dinner round ours last night with friends. Today's been for reading the end of Rosemary Sutcliff's 'Robin Hood'. And, as I hoped , it did become a lot more perilous and dark, and did indeed cover the eventual murder of Robin at Kirklees Abbey. But Marion gets killed off pretty early, and there's a lovely autumnal interlude in which the hardcore Merry Men return to the woods in their personal Middle Ages. I'd definitely recommend Sutcliff's retelling. I'm always mindful, when reading her wonderful, muscular prose, of hearing somewhere about her own physical challenges, and how she would handwrite every draft of every book of hers - sometimes as many as seventeen - in little exercise books. Every word seems so craftily carved out of the page, somehow.

Also this afternoon I've had a spot of Space Opera, in complete contrast to the Greenwood. I came across a marvellous story by Arthur C Clarke called 'The Star' - about a faded civilisation, a supernova and the Christmas story. And then, making lunch I listened to the second half of George Mann's terrific Doctor Who audiobook, 'The Pyralis Effect.' Some great, creepy, gutsy stuff in space. But now it's back to V Sackville West as J. rackets about the house, moving bookcases and boxes and boxes of books. Quite noisily.

P.S

Quote of December comes from from Blair Bidmead: "What's not to like about a final confrontation set in a paper city within the brain of a stuffed zebra where the hero defeats the evil giant insect with a vibrating ballet shoe full of jelly?"