These are not good times, nor are they good days. Setting aside issues of climatic change, the collapse of democracy in the United States, and now the fear and reaction surrounding the hard line right wingers running our government, things are little better in any other sphere of life. As the ‘holiday season’ (forgive me if I say Christmas occasionally) approaches, it’s hard to feel celebratory.

It seems to me that books published around the end of the year, especially late December or early January, really run the risk of being completely overlooked. And, if those books are published other than in the general trade, the likelihood of being overlooked seems to increase markedly.

With that in mind, I thought I’d draw your attention to One Million A.D. , a new science fiction anthology edited by Gardner Dozois. It’s to be published by The SF Book Club in January (well, the website says it ships 31 December, so I’m calling it January), and features SF novellas by Greg Egan, Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, and Charles Stross. While I would be amazed if there wasn’t a trade edition of the book at some time, I can’t imagine a more convincing argument for making the commitment and joining the Book Club *. And, hey, they’ll be publishing my third best novellas anthology soon, and have a cool looking Marvin Kaye antho coming up too. All good stuff.

* Note: You can only join the Club if you’re in North America. Non-USians might try amazon.com or a similar reseller, who usually end up offering SFBC titles for reasonable prices.

Sunburnt and sore. Spent two hours swimming like a Mexican walking fish, which my passengers thought was hilarious fun, but left me tired. Sophie had her first ever Ferris Wheel ride, after an hour waiting in line. No work on projects this weekend. sigh. On with it this week, and the holiday ‘season’ approaches. I won’t have any time off, but I’m still looking forward to it.

If I owe you an email, all apologies. If you’re actually reading this blog in hope I’ll post something intelligent, apologies too. There will be something here soon. In the meantime, back to work.

For all sorts of good reasons, I try to keep this blog completely divorced from my day job. I don’t blog from there, and I don’t talk about what goes on within it’s secretive halls here. Still, today I thought a public acknowledgement was appropriate. I’ve been failing to find the motivation to update my skills to properly use both div-based layouts and cascading style sheets. This hasn’t really been a problem, but my colleague Nick has been a little irritated this past week that, while working together on a big project, some of my coding got a bit too rough around the edges. So, herewith: Nick, who knows and blogs about such things, is right, and I’m wrong. I must learn and use div layouts and .css just as soon as they current crazy times are past. And I will.

So, I didn’t blog about World Fantasy in Madison, where the International Society of the Little Pink Drink was convened, with at least one member in absentia. We’ll reconvene in Brisbane at Easter, hopefully with all members present. In the meantime, it occurs to me that there are some of you out there celebrating (hi USAians), some of you I owe manuscripts / proposals / emails / gifts / phone calls / other good stuff. I’m doing what I can, and you will get it soon. In the meantime, I’ve completed my share of the work on Fantasy: Best of 2005 and Science Fiction: Best of 2005. If all goes as it has in previous years, I’ll see nothing more till January, when copies will start to appear. This is the final year I’ll be co-editing those books with Karen Haber. It’s been fun, and I’ll miss sharing opinions with her. I also signed and returned the contracts for Best Short Novels: 2006, the third year’s best novellas book. I was interested (I think that’s the polite word) to see that the ms. is due on 15 February, so I guess you can all imagine one of the main things I’ll be doing in the best six or eight weeks.

I’m also a little taken aback to see if we’ve started the runup to the festive season already. Parties and ‘graduations’ at the girls’ schools, Christmas parties and such. I think it should be calmer this year (fingers crossed), and I’m determined to relax. It should be fun.