Sabbatical

2009 has been a chaotic year for me and I’ve been trying to catch my breath as well as my bearings.
This is perhaps not the news you were expecting, but I have parted ways with my publisher, Macmillan, due to the turmoil of this year and other mitigating factors. It means that book 3 of the Secret War series is on hold for a while as I decide which project I should be pursuing. I have not made a decision as to whether I continue writing The Black Hours or the planned third book of the Secret War series, The Traitor of Light. But I have made a decision to shelve The Fortress of Black Glass for the time being until it feels right to write it.

I will, of course, keep updating the blog as and when any relevant news comes out, but the impact of family and working life has been too considerable to ignore. In this current climate, I’ve had to look to my family first than my career as a writer and have been forced to make some tough decisions on where I go from here. It does mean that in the future I will have more freedom to approach projects that I want to write, but with an uncertainty over whether those projects are commercial enough and their frequency.

But then, that’s why I do what I do, and why I wrote The Secret War in the first place. Not for the money (which was nice but could never match the wage of the day-job) but because I have an unequivocal belief in what projects I want to pursue.

So a big thanks to everyone who has been supportive on this blog and the Macmillan New Writers blog. It’s made the last four years very special, and hopefully in the near future there will be some news on a new “MFW Curran” book. (For the foreseeable future, any contact should be made via the link to the right i.e. mfwcurran@talktalk.net).

Until then, best wishes

- MFWC