Following on from my comments below, I’m delighted to be able to announce that Gardner Dozois and I have sold an new original anthology, The New Space Opera, to HarperCollins US and HarperCollins Australia. The book is supposed to be BIG and we’ve got all sorts of way cool writers, from M. John Harrison to Dan Simmons, Greg Egan to Charlie Stross on board to write for it. I’m really excited about this book. I started playing with the idea for doing it back in the mid-90s and now it’s finally going to happen. I’m particularly happy about being able to do the book with Gardner. I’ve been a fan of his fiction since reading “Dinner Party” in Mike Bishop’s Light Years and Dark, and his editing since the first Year’s Best. It’s privilege to do a project with him.

Anyhow, enough of my gushing. If all goes to plan the book should be out in early 2007. We have all of the contributors lined up and it should be a joy to do. Can’t wait to see the first stories…

Well, everyone else seems to be falling for the ‘ten things’ meme, so below ‘Ten Things That I’ve Done, That You May Not Have’ (unless you were with me at the time):

1. Taken a shower in a Sydney train station, before spending 12 hours on a train from Sydney to Brisbane.
2. Created my very own science fiction award out of a squeezable rubber cane toad (Mark, the interactive Ditmar), and then taken it on a series of adventures, photographing it at important (well, cheesy) Australian landmarks.
3. Tossed my last twenty pence into a charity tin, before going to an ATM in a Paris airport and finding out that all of my remaining funds had been eaten by creeping exchange rates and that I was broke and a long, long way from home.
4. On a cold and windy morning in the middle of winter, gotten into a rowboat and, before the disbelieving eyes of locals, rowed across a lake to see the ruins of a 6th century abbey in Innisfallen in the south of Ireland.
5. Made love in a sunny glade on a warm day on a hillside in the Catskills.
6. Handed your favorite writer in the world a copy of his brand new book which you are about to publish, literally only hours off the presses, when he’d only the day before told you that it would NEVER be ready in time (hi Howard).
7. Stood on a mountain top in British Columbia and watched a man carve enormous animal totems out of trees with a chainsaw.
8. Accepted a Hugo Award for a friend AND got to tell another friend they’d won a Nebula.
9. Stood in both the Indian and Southern Oceans in one day and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in another, both in the same year.
10. Celebrated three Christmas Days, all in the same year, and all on December 25th – one in Perth, one in Sydney, one in San Francisco.