Just a reminder -

My first-ever guest blogger in this space, Chris Dolley, author (most recently) of the brand spanking new novel "Shift", will be dropping in to chat with you all. Please come back tomorrow and say hello to him!

Guest Blog - meet Chris Dolley

I am Chris Dolley favourite author of the late President of Nigeria who was cruelly murdered last year leaving a library of 20 million books (TWENTY MILLION BOOKS)

But big problem, gentle reader, me very small author with even smaller shelf. How I look after all these books? Which is why I think of you, dear friend, for you be very very well known in Lagos as godly personage with big shelf. If you be helping me sell these many books I will let you have twenty per cent - that be all the verbs and many many pronouns.

Be assured, my godly personage, these books be very very high quality with much good spelling and different words on every page....

Don't worry, this is Alma Alexander's Blog but today, for one day only, Alma has very foolishly kindly invited me along as guest blogger. My name's Chris Dolley and, besides being the favourite author of more dead African Presidents than you can shake a can of spam at, I have two books out this month.

What kind of books?

Yes, I also hear voices. And, being a polite author, I also answer them.

Well, I write books about ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. No ex-Navy Seals, no Kings in waiting, no magicians temping as scullery maids - just ordinary people suddenly faced with a mystery that threatens to tear their world apart.

Why mystery?

Because I love mystery, I love having a book that I can't put down, that makes me keep turning page after page. Which is why every book I write has to have mystery - layers of it. With Resonance, which has just come out in paperback, the mystery begins on page one. Is the narrator insane, confused, the victim of a huge conspiracy? Or is his world really changing before his eyes. And what world is it that we - the reader - have been transported to? Modern day London, a virtual London, an alternate London?

And just when you think you've found out what's going on - wham - you realise that there's an even bigger mystery beneath that.

As Keith Brooke so kindly wrote in Infinity Plus:
"Resonance is a tremendously accomplished book ... and immediately raises Dolley into the ranks of writers to watch. It's a head-over-heels romp through ever-changing realities, crammed with great set-pieces, excellent hooks and some nice one-liners ... Now, I'm running a day late because I just kept on reading until I'd finished the whole book."

In Shift, my latest book, which has just come out in hardcover, I've tried to marry mystery and 'sense of wonder' - asking the questions 'what if superstring theory is right and we do live in an eleven-dimensional universe? What would it look like? Would we have more than length, breadth and depth? What if the human brain protruded into these higher dimensional planes of existence?'

And what would happen if I threw a serial killer with multiple personalities into the mix.

So, shameless plug over, I now return you to your normal service. But not before ending with a kitten picture. To illustrate just how twisty my plots are - they're as twisty as this kitten.