I hate book descriptions. They either tell you too much about the book, or they talk about some other book altogether. Over at the Penguin Australia website there is a description of Justine’s Magic or Madness. It uses some salesfolk talk like ‘thrilling’ and such, and I guess it sort of describes the plot, but it doesn’t really convey how good the book is. I’m just barely smart enough, having written what I just have, to not try to describe it, but suffice to say that it’s really cool, and a lot of fun. Now, allowing that it’s Justine’s first novel, and it’s only published today, most readers in Australia won’t know her name (Larbalestier, Justine), but if you love good YA fiction you should give it a go. Head off to the local Dymocks or A&Rs and remember: is Jazza, is good.

Another chance to hope that experts and predictions are well-informed, but not infallible. Hurricane Katrinia is about four or five hours out from the US coast. Poppy Brite has, sensibly if very reluctantly,, left New Orleans. A CNN reporter is there, and blogging what happens. Let’s hope the predictions are wrong, we all get to wake up to the same New Orleans in the morning.

woke this morning, for the second morning running, with a terrible head-ache. pfeh. australia lost the cricket. i don’t mind – england played well – but i’d feel better if australia weren’t making so many dumb mistakes. i hate it when australia loses, but it’s sort of ok if you go down playing well. that’s what competition is about. when you contribute to your own defeat, well, pfeh. anyway, i promised over at justine’s blog that i’d not make anymore eeyore comments about the cricket, so i’ll try.

there’s talk all over the place about australian sf, small press publishing and so on. it’s the annual self-examination, which is cool. i contributed some comments over at deb’s blog, but find myself writing and dumping responses for shane, ben and others. their observations are cool, i just feel like i’ve danced this dance before, so i think i’ll sit out the rest of this round with the observation that a) it takes time, b) excellence is the key, and c) fandom is wonderful, but it’s not the solution.

what else? beginning to brace myself for the coming weeks. father’s day coming up, then m’s birthday (which should be swell), robin & toula’s wedding, sophie’s birthday (yay!), and then off to the states. somewhere in there i need to finish up a lot of reading and a book. fifty four days till i get on plane. i am so going to sleep in oakland.

i did read some cool stories on the weekend. i’ve got a post half-written on tim’s collaborations from realms of fantasy and polyphony 5, and read terrific stories by chriz barzak and liz williams. also had the weird situation of talking to someone who has read a story for a project i’m doing that i haven’t seen yet. soon.

sunday was interesting. jess (aged 5) went dress shopping with her nan, so marianne and i took sophie out for the afternoon. went to a favorite dim sum place which sophie really liked, then tai chi in king’s park, before heading into the city for shopping. picked up cd’s by ry cooder and the magic numbers, both safely ripped and on the ipod now. tired, though.

So, I’m innocently browing the web this morning, and come across an article about Amazon’s Shorts program (neatly avoiding the article about whethere Christopher Paolini has jumped the shark already). The article doesn’t say much that is interesting, except for providing a list of all of the writers involved in the program, until Big Fish author Daniel Wallace is quoted as saying:

Publishers have always had a hard time selling and marketing the single, short-form work—the novella, for instance, or the novelette, or its even more diminutive cousin, the ‘novelini’—and these days it’s even harder,” says Wallace.

Say what tha?!? Novelini? What the heck is a novelini? Apparently some guy, Adam Engel, has decided to create 20-page novels and call ’em ‘novelini’. I love it. It sounds like a cool new marketing term for ‘short story’, and I hereby dub it so. Now, all I’ve got to do is tell Jeremy that I want to subtitle the new Eidolon anthology – which is nearly finished (yay!!) – a delectation of novelini.

Scott says that Peeps week is now over. We can all resume normal programming, and then he posts this photo (via, I believe, John Scalzi), which I found flat out disturbing.

I’m yet to read Peeps, but will soon. Should you? It depends. Does this picture freek you out? If so, go, buy and read the book. Help end the PEEPing.

Oh, and yeah, I think Single White Parasite would have been a way cool title for the book.