Shadows of the Apt

It's been ten years.

*Ten years*

Empire in Blacks and Gold was published in 2008, this very month*, coming out to what I see in retrospect was actually quite a decent reception. Since when there's been a lot of water under the bridge, and things have been going frankly better than I could ever have anticipated back then.

Actually that's not strictly true because back in 2008 I knew precisely nothing and basically assumed I had won the world. By the time 2009 rolled around, of course, I'd received a fairly standard lesson for a starting author, which is that just because you've won a place on the treadmill it doesn't mean you can just stand about.

To commemorate the fact that I have yet to go professionally extinct, and indeed have managed to thrive and even expand into some neighbouring biomes, I am holding a little competition and/or a book giveaway depending on how you want to look at it. Up for grabs I have:

• 3 copies of Redemption's Blade from Rebellion, to be published this month.
• 3 copies of The Expert System's Brother, my novella from tor.com, ditto out this month
• 3 copies of Dogs of War from Head of Zeus, the new paperback edition.

To throw your hat into the ring, please send me a message using the "Get in touch" panel to the next, headed "Decade Competition" (to minimise the chance of it getting lost in a spam folder" and giving either:

• a species you'd like to see uplifted
• a kinden not yet encountered in Shadows of the Apt.

Also please give:

• Your postal address, because I can't send books by telepathy. I will ensure these all get deleted after the competition.
• Your preference in respect of the three books above. I can absolutely not guarantee you'll get what you're after, but I'll try.

At the end of the month I will pick my favourites and dispatch books, and hopefully also manage to get a blog post up saying I've done so.

So I've rather self-indulgently peppered this post with "covers through the ages", specifically the work of Dominic Harman, Jon Sullivan, Alan Brooks, Taylor Jacobson, Neil Lang, Maz Smit and Matt Griffin, whose talents have contributed significantly, I'm sure, to my success. Below is a little mosaic of just about every book out (ish). Not a bad ten years' work.

*: as far as I recall, and my usual fount of wisdom, Amazon, only lists the 2012 edition.