Been a long time…
Ego is a fragile thing. Every now and again I put my name into google just to see what comes back. The image below comes from Barb de la Hunty’s website and was taken at Swancon XI way back in early 1986. I was 22, and it feels like a long time ago.

It’s Thursday morning and I’m sitting in my office. The airconditioning doesn’t seem to have kicked in properly and it feels like I’m breathing dust. Itchy eyes, runny nose – all the kind of things that make allergies so much fun.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m in a pretty scattered frame of mind at the moment. I’m ‘reading’ four or five books all at once. I’m about 40 pages into China Mieville’s Iron Council, 150 pages into Robert Wexler’s Circus of the Grand Design, 50 or 60 pages into Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, and about the same distance into Leslie What’s Olympic Games. Now, I don’t like reading more than one book at a time, but I just can’t quite get settled into a book at the moment. All of the books mentioned seem to have a lot of strengths, and I’m interested, but… Now, I know the solution to this problem. A new Terry Pratchett novel always gets me back on track and reading, but I don’t expect one of those for another month or two, which is too far away. I’ll push ahead.

I’m currently trying to read as much short fiction as possible too, but it feels like the market is shattering right before my very eyes. While I don’t think it’s ever really been possible to keep up with what’s going on in short fiction by reading just the major magazines, you could at least maintain the illusion of keeping up. No longer. While the ‘majors’ (ie Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, SciFiction), are still the heart of the business, there are so many magazines, ‘zines, anthologies, collections, websites, and chapbooks publishing worthwhile work now that it’s impossible to keep track of what’s being published, never mind read it. Suddenly places that you could safely ignore as not being likely to publish interesting work are regularly including top quality fiction. It’s good, but it makes this ‘year’s best’ thing a bit more time consuming.

On that score, I don’t think I mentioned but I just sent the contracts back to Green Bay for the two year’s best volumes I’m co-editing with Karen Haber. This is definitely a good thing, because we’ve both been working hard on the books for a while now. They’re due at the publisher on 1 November, so we’ll be start the winnowing process at WorldCon in Boston, and hopefully get close to a final ToC for each book by the beginning of October. We’ve already got working short lists for both books, and I’m sufficiently confident about some of the stories going into the books that I’ve started drafting story notes and such for them.

I’m also working away on a number of anthology projects at the moment, as always. Got a knock back on one yesterday (which was ok and not unexpected), and started putting ideas for another down on paper with a friend of mine. I’v always got to do a bunch of work on the book I’m doing for Sharyn, so that it’s running smoothly, and have to put some stuff on paper for a project I’m doing with Jack. Busy.

What else? It’s tax time here Down Under. We’ve just got through the end of financial year, so I’ve got all sorts of paperwork to do in the next three or four weeks because it’s all got to be finished and done with before I go to WorldCon. Which (eek!) is just seven weeks away. That snuck up. I think that’s about it for now, but if not, more later.