Early in September I got some very bad news. Just what that was won’t be discussed here, but what’s important is that it was the kind of bad news that makes you very angry. And, unfortunately, it was that particularly bad kind of anger where I wasn’t angry with anyone or anything – I was just angry. Undirected anger is the worst because there’s no-one you can really take it out on without being a jerk.

Fortunately, once I had fumed and sulked for a while, a new idea popped into my head, and I took a liking to it. In a very pig-headed, surly mood, I sat down and channeled my anger into doing something useful: in other words, I wrote a book.

Yesterday I finished that book and sent it off to my agents. The new book is completely unrelated to the griffin series, or anything else I’ve written before. Given the state of mind I was in when I wrote it, it is unsurprisingly a satire. While writing it I made a point of not doing any research, not thinking anything through any further than was absolutely necessary, and generally just going for broke. At one point I actually flipped a coin to decide what would happen next.

All that must sound horribly self-indulgent, and in a way it is, but only up to a point. Long experience has taught me that not trying very hard often produces the best results. Even if I’m wrong in this case, at least I enjoyed the process.

Anyway, the new book is called Ambit and Snarl, and the tagline is “F*ck destiny” – without the censoring, of course. I try and avoid using curse words here since kids visit this site. But it must already be obvious that Ambit and Snarl is not a children’s book. I certainly wasn’t in the mood for pandering to anyone when I wrote it, and by gods it was liberating.

~KJT, who is quite visibly going grey at 27, but managed to be mistaken for a 14-year-old last week.