it’s definitely begun. stories have started to trickle in, all sparkly and new, and ready to read. a pile is forming in the study. reading to do. sadly, the stupid email address isn’t working, so if you find it all coming unstuck email me at jstrahan at iinet dot net dot au with your submission. it’ll be cool, and i’ll take care of it. apologies for any inconvenience.

it’s definitely a lowercase kind of morning, though there have been nice things. read gavin’s story, and it’s very cool. gavin is such a nice guy, and is partnered up with an equally nice person who’s also a terrific writer, that it’s easy to overlook that he’s a great writer himself. checkiddout.

what else? the young adult sf book continues to morph, twist, change and evolve as the submissions come in. i started the book with a particular vision, but it began to change as i read each subsequent story. there are still a bunch of stories (hi writers!) due in, so it’ll change more. just typing that made me happy.

this has been an interesting year. i’ve been tired a lot, run down running after kids and so on, but i’ve become a lot clearer about what i’m doing and why, which is good. i think by the time i’ve fulfilled all of the contracts i have and set up the next round (fingers crossed) i may actually have my own thoughts on it under control.

the main thing i’ve been working on is keeping an open mind about what i’m doing. it’s easy to be overwhelmed, rundown and worn out reading. at times every new book through the front door feels like a threat, every story seems like a chore, and you feel like you know where it’s going, before you even start. but that’s going away, slowly. reading jeff ford’s girl in the glass helped, so does reading macleod’s the summer isles. how can you read ‘some zombie contingency plans’ and not smile? even analog is starting to look good. rich says it’s having a golden year, and that’s worth listening to.

if i were to summarise, i’d say that these are good times that haven’t quite felt like good times, but i’m getting there. and what’s coming up? well, i really want to get trish sullivan’s new book from orbit, and gwyneth jones’ new one. i hear death cab for cutie’s transatlanticism is good. i am going to get that ipod, go to melbourne, and wisconsin. it’s all working out. maybe i should read some hard sf. that’d be good. bye now.

China Mieville’s latest novel is sitting on the Hugo ballot right now, and he’s had several good stories out in the last twelve months (most notably in a McSweeney’s anthology). It now looks like we’ll see his first short story collection, Looking for Jake in August. It’ll feature a comic strip, his wonderful novella “The Tain”, and eleven other stories. According to some of the descriptions I’ve seen, there will be original stories in the book, some set in New Crobuzon. Sounds terrific, and definitely high on my ‘to read’ list. Can’t wait to see it, or the galley.

Way back in January of 1998, when I was still living at Yosemite Ave in Oakland, I read and reviewed Sean Williams’ second novel The Resurrected Man for Locus. I liked it then, and I liked it now. Paul Di Filippo likes it too, and gives it a good review over at SciFi.com. The new US edition has a cool John Picacio cover, and is from Lou Anders’ Pyr sf line. Check it out.

It was a curious long weekend. As you all know, we’re being visited by Marianne’s mother, which is going very well. An unexpected side effect of her being here is that I’m getting a bit of time to get work done, largely because our car doesn’t fit three adults and two kids in car seats, so when trips are to be taken, Marianne takes her mother and the kids, and I stay home. This is, mostly, okay.

So, what have I done with this unexpected time? Well, I finished reading Jeff Ford’s The Girl in the Glass, which is a remarkably fine novel, and easily the best thing he’s ever done at book length. It’s set in the North Eastern US ’round the time of the Great Depression and tells of how a trio of conmen, who have been running a very effective spiritualist scam, become involved in solving the murder of a young girl. It should be out in August, I think, so make sure you check it out. I’m now reading Ian R. Macleod’s second novel for the year, The Summer Isles, an so far remarkably good alternate history set in a rather nasty post-WWII Britain. More on this soon.

Other than that, I hung out with family, picked up the new Bruce Springsteen cd under amusing circumstances, and fiddled around with anthology projects. Stories are slowly, but steadily, coming in for The Starry Rift. The deadline is still a little while away, and I can definitely see the core of the book emerging now, which is both good and a relief. Stories are also beginning to trickle in for Eidolon which is nice (I think we have the first story we’re going to definitely accept), and there’s been a little movement on the year’s best front. All in all, not too bad.

Oh, except for the washing machine dying yesterday. Much home maintenance is needed.

I was going to suggest that everyone should go read John Clute’s really quite interesting review of Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers, and you still should. But…I’ve just read the latest post from Ken Macleod over at Early Days of a Better Nation, where he queries the accuracy of his own recollections about the history of SF. It’s a subject I find fascinating because I think we are subject to the ‘collective wisdom’, do sign up for the consensus view of things, and don’t usually have time to go back and check that our facts are straight. Read it.

Oh, and another fascinating piece here, which ties up with the Macleod piece above, from Charlie Stross, about sf and the cultural zietgeist.