Well, I’ve received about four hundred items of comment spam in the past 24 hours. I’ve not been able to get a decent spam filter working and I think, until I do, I’m going to turn off commenting. Hopefully this won’t be for long. If you have a comment you’d like to make, please feel free to email me, and I’ll add it.

Cory Doctorow is writing a bimonthly column in Locus about being a writer in the 21st Century.

The first instalment, “Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet” (which appears in the July issue of Locus), is now online at Locus: Online.

You can also check out more Cory stuff at boingboing.

In October this year Allen & Unwin will publish Margo Lanagan’s Red Spikes, her third short story collection, and the follow up to her World Fantasy Award winning collection, Black Juice. Because of the reception that Margo got for both Black Juice and “Singing My Sister Down” from critics and awards juries, I think a lot of readers wondered if that book lived up to the hype. Mostly I think people found that it did. The other thing that people have wondered is, can she do it again?

Well, it’s too early to say for sure, but the nice folks at Allen & Unwin here in Australia recently produced an intriguing little book – a sampler with three stories apiece from White Time, Black Juice and Red Spikes – that suggests the answer may be yes. The three stories from Red Spikes – “A Good Heart”, “Daughter of the Clay” and “Under Hell, Over Heaven” – are all strong stories, with “A Good Heart” possibly the stand out. I also read her story “A Pig’s Whisper” in the new Agog!, which made me shudder. Hmm. Can’t wait to see the other seven stories from the new book. She’s an amazing writer.

I’ve slowly been working away on a number of projects in the background here at Coode Street. In addition to the overagonised rationalisation of financial paperwork and such, several new proposals are even now winging their way out to publishers, and we’ve finalised the plans for the family trip to the US in August/September.

To give a brief run down, Marianne, Jessica, Sophie and I will fly out of wet and wintry Perth on the morning of Tuesday, August 15. We’ll be overnighting in Suh-Suh-Suh-Sidenney, before flying on to San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon. We arrive there on Wednesday morning. I think we’re going to stay in a B&B in Berkeley or something like that on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, catching up with friends, taking the girls to Fentons, and seeing CHARLES. The girls willl then fly on to New York on Saturday morning, and I’ll head up to CHARLES’s house for a couple days of fine scotch and conversation (I might even try to record the first ever Locus deckcast, if I can). From there, CHARLES, Liza and I fly down to Los Angeles for LAConIV on Tuesday 22 August, getting in around noon. I’ll be sharing a suite with the International Society for Little Pink Girlie Drinks, which should be enormous fun, hanging out with the Locus gang, the Night Shade Posse (of which I am a member), and catching up with friends. I might squeeze a business get together or two in, but basically this one’s mainly going to be for fun. Then, on Monday 28 August, at just after noon, I fly off to New York to catch up with the girls, see family again and such. I know we’re planning some time up in the Catskills that week/weekend, which should be great, then back to the city for the week of the 4th of September. I know we’re also going to spend a couple nights at a hotel in Manhattan, when we’ll do mega-tourist stuff (Sophie really wants to go to the Statue of Liberty), and I’ll do a little business and catch up with industry friends like Howard, Ellen, LaGringa, and maybe even the Lad. We’ll celebrate Marianne’s birthday with her family, then we have the horror trip back doing New York – LA – Sydney – Perth non-stop. We will be weary by then.

Now, if you’re going to be somewhere that I am, and you’d like to catch up, let me know. I’d love to see EVERYone, but especially CHARLES. I’m tired now, but this is going to be fun.