I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about or planning blog posts: they tend to be pretty spontaneous. Yesterday morning, though, I was sitting around thinking about blogging about short fiction generally, and the recent short fiction of Peter Beagle specifically. Beagle is a wonderful writer, but wasn’t really known for his short fiction until recently. Since early 2004 he’s written some amazing short stories, including a couple for me that I love a great deal. I was also aware that he had close to a dozen new stories coming this year, so it seemed timely.

Because I can’t help myself, I emailed his business manager to get a current bibliography. I couldn’t find one, and I thought I’d list all of his new fiction in my post. It also occurred to me that it’d be cool to have someone publish a treasury of his best short fiction, a 200,000 word collection covering the close to fifty years of his fiction writing career. So, I shot off an email to Bill at Subterranean Press, who I’ve worked with on a couple projects recently. I then pretty much forgot about it (family grabbed my attention).

Before I knew it, though, I’d heard back from Bill, he was in touch with Peter and his agent, details were discussed and so on. Less than 24 hours after pondering a blog post, I have now agreed to edit Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle. It will be published in October 2009 to coincide with the San Jose World Fantasy Convention, which I’ll be attending. I’m a bit breathless really. It’s exciting, and shows how some projects take a loooong time, and some just materialise out of thin air.