i was cuddling sophie, who has an ear infection, when i turned to marianne and asked her if you could get peeps for the ipod. she wasn’t sure. peeps, she seemed to think, were fine, but perhaps a little inflexible. i’ve not seen any peeps myself, so i have to take her word for it. she’s a judge for the aurealis awards this year, so i’ll definitely trust her opinion peeps.

there are a lot of things i like about blogs, and some things i don’t. one thing i really like is that if you read a number of writers’ blogs you begin to get a feeling that there is this constant background hum of creativity happening. neil is writing a short story in brown ink, poppy is almost at the end of a novel, justine and scott are getting ready to head off to mexico to do some writing (how hemingway!), and jeff just posted a short story to his blog. and there’s more. books are being published, stories created. it’s swell.

oh, yeah. still completely in love with the ipod. managed to get 5320 songs onto it in just over a week. it’s half full, so i’m going to slow down a little. must say, though, this is my first apple product and, while i love ipod, the apple software is just appalling. how do those guys make money writing cr*p like that? sheesh.

sometimes i think my real superpower is moping. need to find new antho. title. am no good with antho titles. will mope instead. transmission resumes shortly. there may be more moping. don’t say you weren’t warned.

Fairly mediocre review of Science Fiction: Best of 2004 over at BestSF.net. Mark Watson makes the comment that:

“My feeling with this volume, as in previous years, is that the selections seem somewhat arbitrary, as if the rush to get the volume out so early (the initial publication date of February).

This Haber/Strahan volume has few stories than the Hartwell/Cramer volume, and unless you are looking for the shortest possible Year’s Best read, I would put the latter volume ahead of the one in hand, as being the better buy of the two pocket sized collections this year.”

There’s no doubt that the early publication date has a significant impact on the two ibooks year’s bests. Still, you do the job you can. We’re working on the next pair at the moment, and hopefully they’ll be somewhat better. We’ll see.

Ariel, over at The Alien Online, reports that Steve Jones is looking for horror stories for his the Best New Horror 17. No Australians, of course, but drop him a line (130 Park View, Wembley, Middx HA9 6JU, England) if you have something he might be interested in.