Edited some more of my D B Shan book. It's a twisty little beast, even by my standards, a ghost story unlike any other! I know that's a large claim to make, but I certainly haven't ever read anything quite like this one!! Elements of it come in from all over the place, from movies and books and comics, but the way they all click together is quite unique, to the best of my knowledge. Here's hoping my publishers are tickled by its twists as much as I am when I send it to them!!!

I was delighted to recently be granted permission by the band, Maximo Park, to use some lyrics from one of their songs at the start of Hell's Heroes. I've often seen other writers use song lyrics at the beginning of a book (Stephen King, in particular, does it almost all the time), and it was something I was curious to do one day. But I didn't want to do it just for the sake of doing it -- I would only do so if there was a veyr strong reason for including them. A couple of years ago, when I was first working on Hell's Heroes, I was listening to Maximo Park's first album, A Certain Trigger. It's a great album, but one song in particular got me buzzing -- Apply Some Pressure. I used to listen to it all the time, especially on planes -- I had a habit for a while of listening to the song shortly after take-off every time I took a flight, cranked up to full volume! It's a brilliant song (I'll try and set it as my MySpace home page song after I'm finishing writing this, so that you can have a listen if you aren't familiar with it), but I had an extra special reason for loving it so much -- some of the lyrics tied in very neatly with one of the themes of Hell's Heroes. I thought it would be great if I could use those lyrics at the start of the book, so I asked my agent to seek the band's permission. For a long time we weren't able to make contact, and I thought the opportunity might pass me by, but at the last minute (literally!!), we were given the green light -- I was DEEEEE-lighted!!!!! I'm not going to say what the lyrics are, or how they tie in with the book. You'll have to wait until October to find out!! But have a listen in the meantime and see if you can guess (a) which lyrics I've chosen, and (b) what plot clues you can glean from them -- no prizes for anyone who guess right, except for the prize of knowing you were a bit smarter than, and one step ahead of, most other fans!!!!