Screengrabs below, or check it out at Storify…

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It’s World Book Day in the UK and Ireland! Whatever you’re doing to celebrate it, whether it’s dressing up at school or just going out to buy some books, have an awesome time…

You can see the eight exclusive World Book Day books here – they should be available in your local bookshop for just £1 each now.

And for the second year running, there is a FREE World Book Day app which you can download right now. It has fantastic stories by Patrick Ness, Dawn O’Porter, Alex Scarrow, Chris Ryan and others, including myself. Yes, I’m in there as well :)

My story is called The Secret History of a Teenage Vampire, and features Larissa Kinley in conversation with a teenage girl who is both the only survivor of a vampire attack and a living, breathing reminder of the life that Larissa was forced to leave behind. But as is often the case inside Department 19, things are not always as they seem…

Click on the cover for the links to download the World Book Day YA app powered by Movellas.

I wrote it the morning after I finished the final draft of Battle Lines, and I’m really proud of it – it gives an insight into a little bit of what happened to Larissa between when she was bitten by Grey and when she turned up in a park in Nottingham with orders to kill Jamie Carpenter. And did I mention it’s completely FREE?

Download the app and get involved – World Book Day is a fantastic initiative and I’m delighted that they asked me to be a small part of it.

Now go and read something…

NOTE: Due to the way World Book Day is organised the app is only available to people in the UK and Ireland. But for everyone else, we’ll be making the story available worldwide later on in 2013. 

Just a very quick post to say that my UK publishers HarperCollins have put the prologue of Department 19: Battle Lines online! Click on the cover to read it and let me know what you think in the comments section…

It’s barely a month until Department 19: Battle Lines is published, and there’s going to be a lot of cool stuff happening between now and then. I’ve also got some awesome World Book Day news to tell you as soon as all the details are finalised, and I’m about to start serious work on book four. But today is a big day for me, for a simple reason – today sees the publication of the first of a trilogy of original Department 19 stories called The Department 19 Files.

Here are the (awesome!) covers:

So the obvious question – what exactly are they? To answer that, let me take you back through the mists of time, to when a naive young writer had just sold the first three books in the series that would soon come to be called Department 19 and had a grand, ambitious idea…

I had just written the chapters of Department 19 that are set in London in 1892, and was having more fun than I’d ever had in my life – the story was opening up in front of me, and I was incredibly excited about the possibilities of the world that I’d stumbled upon. I was already planning the chapters set in New York on the eve of the Great Depression, when an awesome possibility struck me…

The story of Department 19 takes place inside an organisation that had existed for more than a hundred years, and I had already decided it was going to feature fictionalised versions of real events and people. So the idea was that in between writing the novels that tell the main story, I would write a series of stories from the organisation’s past, with the end result being a long alternate history of the twentieth century, from the perspective of Blacklight and the men and women who had served it over the years. Stories set during the two World Wars, during the Cold War, during Vietnam and Korea and the War on Terror. Tales of Operators and vampires in far-flung corners of the world, as the key moments of the century played out around them. Pretty cool, right?

Unfortunately, I had no idea how long the novels were going to become, or how much time actually publishing them was going to take. So the grand plan was sidelined, as I concentrated on telling Jamie Carpenter’s story. But the idea was still there, ticking over and gradually fleshing itself out as I worked on the books, and I slowly filled a notebook with ideas for stories set in the illustrious (and often very dark) history of Blacklight. And one particular story kept nagging at me, wanting to be told…

In Department 19 a reeling, awestruck Jamie is shown the Fallen Gallery, where the names of the men and women who died in the service of Blacklight are recorded for posterity. It also contains portraits of the five men who founded the Department, and a stone bust of Quincey Harker emblazoned with the legend ALL THAT WE ARE, WE OWE TO HIM. Quincey always fascinated me – he is mentioned in the sort-of epilogue to Dracula, when Jonathan Harker gives an update seven years after the destruction of the Count, and when I was first wondering what those characters might have done after the end of Stoker’s classic tale, Quincey was at the front of my mind. I knew that I was going to make him responsible for the expansion of D19, and I knew that why he did so was going to be related to his service at the front during World War One. I didn’t know the exact details, until I wrote his story, the first part of which was published today…

Now, before you ask, there are a couple of things I want to clear up.

Firstly, that if all you want to read is the story of Jamie and his friends versus Dracula and the forces of evil, then just buy Battle Lines and the two novels that will follow it. There are no secret revelations in the Department 19 Files that change what’s happening in the novels, no bits that will mean the rest of the series doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read them. I promise you that, right now. This is a trilogy of new stories, set in the same world as Jamie’s, which you don’t have to have read the novels to enjoy, and vice versa…

Secondly, these are NOT novels – they are short stories. So please don’t buy them expecting 700 new pages of blood and mayhem :)

Thirdly, they are only available as ebooks – there are no plans at the moment to release physical editions of these stories…

So with that out of the way – if you want to read about Quincey Harker and his horrifying adventures in the darkness of the Western Front, pick up The Devil In No Man’s Land. If you want to see a younger Valeri Rusmanov doing what he does best as Europe is gripped by the flu pandemic of 1918 (and read some of the nastiest stuff I’ve ever written!) then stick around for Undead in the Eternal City. And if you want to know what happened when Quincey Harker returned home and discovered the truth about what his father and his friends really do, then The New Blood contains the answers, along with some characters that fans of Dracula will be very familiar with!

I’m really proud of The Department 19 Files - they’re some of the darkest, most painful stuff I’ve written, and are full of all the action and gore you’ll be expecting :) They shed light on the early years of Blacklight and how it became the organisation that Jamie and his friends are parts of, and they allowed me to write about one of the most fascinating periods in history, a period of mechanised death and devastation on a scale that is almost unimaginable in these days of drone strikes and laser-targeted bombs. And I’m very hopeful that the time will come when I can do more of them – there are more stories to tell. Many more…

I hope you enjoy them – let me know in the comments section below!

The Department 19 Files will definitely be available in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, from wherever ebooks are sold. The rights and territories get very complicated very quickly, so I can’t be certain about the rest of the world in the short term, but I’m working on getting them as widely available as possible ASAP. I’ll post updates here as and when I have them. The same goes for translations – my fingers are crossed, but it’s a case of wait and see for the time being.

Some of the links are not live yet – I’ll update them as they come online…

 PUBLISHED TODAY!

 UK links: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook | Waterstones | Google Play

 Australia/New Zealand links: HarperCollins

 Canada: Amazon | Kobo

 PUBLISHING 7TH MARCH 

UK links: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook | Waterstones | Google Play

 Australia/New Zealand links: HarperCollins

 Canada: Amazon | Kobo

 PUBLISHING 14TH MARCH

 UK links: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook | Waterstones | Google Play

 Australia/New Zealand links: HarperCollins

 Canada: Amazon | Kobo

This morning I sent the Battle Lines manuscript off to be copyedited.

It’s almost the end of the process – the (brilliant) copyeditor that HarperCollins uses worked on The Rising as well, so she will go through the whole text for consistency, continuity, repetitions, timing problems, and simple bad writing. When she’s done, I accept or reject (mostly it will be accept!) her changes, and it goes to be proofread, the final spelling and grammar and style check before the text gets designed and the file is sent off to the printers.

I don’t know how I feel about this one, to be honest. I’m very proud of it, and my editor (whose opinion I generally trust more than my own!) thinks it’s the best of the series, which is lovely to hear. But right now I’m so deep into it that I can’t see the wood for the trees, and I just want it out there for people to read.

It’s a long book (although the final edit has made it a few thousand words shorter than The Rising, which I’m sure the HarperCollins production department will be delighted to hear!) that has taken a long time to write, and has been undoubtedly the hardest of the three books I’ve written so far.  Maybe when I’ve got a bit of distance I’ll have a look back at the process and write something about why, but for now I’m just absolutely delighted that it’s done…

Anyway – here, for no other reason than that I think they look cool, are screengrabs of the whole Battle Lines manuscript at 10% size! This is the final version, with tracked changes visible – and anyone who has used them will know exactly what all that red means. Click on them for bigger versions, but don’t bother enlarging them – you can’t see anything :)

 Thanks to everyone who has sent messages and Tweets telling me they’re excited about Battle Lines. Give it a few days, and I will be too…

Now I’m going to get some sleep.