Happily, unexpectedly I find myself on the other side of the country. This morning I kissed Marianne, Sophie and Jessica goodbuye at 7am. Went to the airport too early, got a good seat for an uneventful flight to Melbourne. Bumped into Sean Williams at the airport gate, and shared a flight to Canberra with him. It was great to see him. Then met Garth Nix at the gate, drove into the city and checked into the hotel. Tomorrow Conflux, but first had a great conversation with Nick Stathopoulos who I hadn’t seen in five years. It was great to reconnect. Then time with Garth, before dinner with Garth, Jack Dann, Sean Williams, Deb Biancotti, Ellen Datlow, Justin Ackroyd and others. A good time. They came back to the suite for drinks, then bed. Great to see Russell too, and David Coe. Tonight was worth the trip itself. More tomorrow.

Way back when I attended a party at WorldCon in San Jose. It was to launch the first volume in an ambitious but untested new anthology series from a new publisher. The publisher was Wheatland Press and the series was Deborah Layne and Jay Lake’s extremely well-received and all round kinda wonderful Polyphony. The party was good but the book was better, and Deborah and Jay have gone on to edit a series that does what ever series should: get better with each volume.

While we’re all currently waiting for Polyphony 6 (yes, six!) to appear, Deb has decided to make it even easier for people to pick up a copy of Polyphony and see what all of the fuss is about. If you pop over to the Wheatland Press website and order any title before 30 June, you’ll get a Polyphony of your choice free!

Now, this is an exceptionally good offer, given that you can choose between great books like All Star Zeppelin Stories, Steve Utley’s The Beasts of Love, Howard Waldrop’s Dream Factories and Radio Pictures, or Jay Lakes’s Greetings from Lake Wu. There is a veritable feast of coolness to choose from. How could you resist? Why would you resist? Go buy a book: buy one for a friend and get one for yourself for nothing! You get to look good by giving someone a present and still score a book for yourself. It doesn’t get much better than that.

The Mythopoeic Society has announced the 2006 finalists for the various Mythopoeic Awards. I was delighted, but unsurprised, to see Locus colleague Tim Pratt nominated for his novel The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl and Neil Gaiman for his novel Anansi Boys in the Adult Literature category, and very chuffed to see Holly Black’s fine novel Valiant shortlisted in the Children’s Literature category. Good luck, one and all.

Over the coming months I’m going to be doing a number of things here to help promote work that I think is worthwhile, noteworthy, or just neat in some way. Sometimes I’ll be promoting a project that I’ve had something to do with, sometimes it’ll be something done by a friend, and sometimes it’ll simply be something that I know about and think is worth taking up some of your time to talk about. While I’m still sketching out a few details, there’ll be reviews, interviews, excerpts and podcasts of stuff.

The Coode Street Podcast No.1

I’m starting things off with a podcast of a brand new story by Deborah Biancotti. You can find out all about it over on the Coode Street Podcast page.

While I will post a longer note on Talking Squid, I did provide a comment to Gary Kemble at ABC’s Articulate blog about the upcoming Orbit Australia line.