Things you must never do on the net #1. Go to google. Enter the search criteria “symptoms” + “whatever physical ailment or disfiguration is bothering me today”. It will drive you crazy. It will not help. Ever. If you have an ailment or disfiguration, go to a doctor. They will actually examine you and diagnose what might be wrong. They should prescribe something to fix your problem. You can then go and google about what you’ve actually got. That can be informative, and being well-informed is a good thing. Googling first will only lead to insanity, or blindness, or whatever it is you get when you do things in the dark by yourself way too much.

It’s been an interesting morning so far. I woke up at 3.30 am to the smell of smoke filling the house. Perth is currently surrounded by raging bushfires lit by some sick idiots, so I knew it was almost certainly just smoke from the distant fires being blown our way. Still, I had to check.

Got up, walked around the outside of the house in my underwear in the dark checking the whole building for any signs of fire or fire hazard. It was all okay, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. Tossed and turned for a couple hours, got up, had breakfast and checked email. Yay. There were a couple of work emails that had to be dealt with, both of which brought deadline awareness crashing back in on me.

Even though we haven’t actually inked the contract, I got an email from my editor at the SFBC asking when he might see the ms. for Best Short Novels. My first thought was GAH! My second was, isn’t this early? We hadn’t agreed on a delivery date. I was sleepy of course, so I checked. The date was “mid-January” and I looked back at last year and saw that I delivered on the 14th. I’ve sheepishly asked if I can send him the ms. on Monday, which will give me a chance to work out a running order for the stories and put the ms. together. I’ve got ten stories – everyone said yes, which is cool – so that should take a little while. Then I’ve just got to finalise contracts, payments and write the intro and story notes. A busy weekend beckons.

I then noticed an email from my agent, so I called him in New York to go over some details. There was contract stuff and the usual, but it also became pretty clear that there’s been stuff going back and forth – email and packages – that haven’t reached their destinations. Very weird. We talked about it, so it should all be fine, but it was odd.

I’ve also had a story sitting around that I need to re-read to get back to the author about for a while. I’m going to go over it at lunchtime, and then I need to fax New York. Yay!

I can’t keep track of all of the stories being published all over the place, and neither can you. The fun folk over at the BBC Cult website just published five new stories online. They are:

“The Spy’s Retirement”, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
“The Lady Downstairs”, by Christopher Fowler
“The Lost World” by Dominic Green
“A Shambles in Belgravia”, by Kim Newman
“The Deer Stalker” by Paul Cornell

I need to read ’em, and you should probably check them out too.

You don’t always notice your own bad habits. For reasons that aren’t entirely logical, I spent a little time looking through the archives on this site and noticed a tendency to post at either around 7am or 7pm. I’ll try to change that. The other thing I noticed is that I use the word ‘cool’ too much. Looking at how I use it, it seems to be a lazy kind of shorthand for not actually describing something. Therefore, henceforth this blog will eschew the use of the word ‘cool’.

I was just looking at Ellen Datlow’s website and, if my calculations are correct, the next volume of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror will be her fiftieth anthology, which seems like a heck of a milestone.