I am one of the least organised people I know, which is not good. I need to be better organised, that way I’d be less flustered when I’m reminded of deadlines. Yesterday was a ‘work from home’ day, and it was mostly productive. I got a lot done, and made some progress on anthology work. The main thing that has changed since my chirpy post about the weekend is that the deadlines now look much more concrete. The 1 March delivery date for The Starry Rift, which was always there, is now solid and urgent. This is for good reason, and I’m happy with it. Everyone at Viking has been wonderful (hi Sharyn!) and all of the contributors have been terrific to deal with – I just suddenly feel a need to re-read the whole book, re-check the texts, review the running order of stories and so on. I also now definitely need to get the introduction and author bio notes in shape. This also makes the 16 February delivery date for Best Short Novels even more important. I have all of the stories, all of the permissions, and most of the story notes. Again, I need to write the introduction, clean up three of the story notes, and confirm the running order. The book is 220,000 words long, so I’d like to do that without re-reading too much, but that may not be possible. I also need to get six different proposals done, and I’m trying to work out a few other things. Still, I do have eight days, including a weekend, so it’s all do-able, if the rest of the world just keeps in line.

I have struggled for a long time to work out, and clearly express, exactly what I feel is wrong with Charles de Lint’s later novels. I first read de Lint’s work back in the mid-80s when I stumbled across a copy of Yarrow. I was intrigued by his combination of magic and urban landscapes, and went on to read pretty much everything he wrote (to date I think the only Newford novel I’ve not read is Spirit in the Wires), and to like a great deal of it. It’s long been my feeling that he reached his peak back in 1994 when Tor published Memory and Dream. It seemed to me then, and still does now, to be the best expression of everything that he’s about: the magic, the love of art and artists, the opposition to abuses of power and so on.

In the following years though, as first Trader appeared, and then Someplace To Be Flying, Forests Of The Heart, and then The Onion Girl were published I increasingly struggled with his novels, and eventually thought I was going to stop altogether (which is why I skipped Spirits In The Wires). The reason, I’d begun to realise, was that the message had taken over the medium. De Lint’s love of art and artists, who are best loved in his stories, and his understandably passionate fight against those who would use their power to dominate and damage the defenceless consumed the stories he had to tell. Gradually, the stories became secondary, and the characters became mouthpieces. This was clearest in The Onion Girl, which focussing as it does on artist and survivor of abuse, Jilly Coppercorn, is also arguably closest to these two great concerns.

And yet, I went on to read The Blue Girl, which avoided a lot of this, and was de Lint’s strongest novel in a decade, and then over the weekend I read Widdershins. It’s a book I approached with real caution, advertising, as it does, the consummation at last of the relationship between two of de Lint’s longest running cast of characters. For the most part, it’s a terrific book, right up to the discussion of power and the abuse of power. At that point it becomes polemic, the characters flatten and become two dimensional as they use pretty much exactly the same language to express their views on the subject. Were they to approach the same subject differently, to not use the same expressions and so on, their views might appear to be that of a like-minded collective, but when a young girl and an aged Native American spirit both express the same view in the same language they seem more like mouthpieces for the author, rather than individual characters. While this is disappointing, it’s something I hope over time de Lint will work through (assuming he’d even see it as a problem) because there’s a lot in Widdershins to like. I guess I’ll be reading the next one after all.

The shortlist for the 22nd annual Crawford Award, presented by the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, has been announced. The nominees are:

• Judith Berman, Bear Daughter
• Hal Duncan, Vellum
• Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night
• Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
• Sarah Monette, Melusine
• Holly Phillips, In the Palace of Repose
• Anna Tambour, Spotted Lily

You can find a list of previous winners here. I was involved in the deliberations this year, and was delighted with the quality of work we saw, and with the final list. I’m especially happy to see some collections on the list, and to see a fellow Aussie being honored.

It was a tiring, but productive weekend. After a lot of running around, and a lot of help, the submission manuscript for Best Short Novels: 2006 is almost ready to go. The permissions for the stories are done, I have clean copy for all nine stories, story notes for seven of them, and will write the introduction this week. The deadline for the book is February 16, but I’m optimistic that I’ll get this one in the email by Friday. I won’t announce the full table of contents for this book till close to publication – which should be June (I think) – but I’m very happy with it.

I also made good progress towards completing The Starry Rift. This is my young adult science fiction book. It was originally slated to come out in 2006, but will now be out in early 2007 for all sorts of good publishing kind of reasons. I’ve been holding the book for one last story, which hasn’t quite materialised yet. I did, however, buy another story on the weekend. I’m not sure the other will happen, but I’m doing everything I can to make sure it does. Either way, the book’s due in on 1 March. I’ve got permissions, story notes, and afterwords in shape. All I need there is the introduction and I’m done. I was looking over the ms. on Sunday and I love this book. It’s very cool and I can’t wait to see it come out. I’m also beginning to see the submissions come in for The New Space Opera, the anthology I’m doing with Gardner Dozois. That one’s pretty exciting too. The writers are fantastic, and it’s fascinating getting to work up close with Gardner (who I’ve admired since I read the first of his Bluejay year’s bests back in the mid-80s).

It was also a good weekend for clearing other decks. I’ve been working to complete the editing on the review columns for the March 2006 issue of Locus, and that should be finished by tonight. I’ve also been in discussions with CHARLES and Liza on some other stuff for the magazine, all of which is good. I even had time to take part in a family birthday party, catch an episode of The Gilmore Girls, and do some reading.

On that score, I’ve been meaning to mention Andy’s post on How to Read a Book a Day. I’ve been lamenting, of late, that I’ve struggled to finish reading any books, and that when I do, they take forever to get through. It’s been a real weight. Reading Andy’s post brought the stunningly obvious in stark relief: the reason I’m not getting any books read is that I’m not only running as fast as I can doing everything else, but the stuff I’ve become occupied doing over the past four years or so has taken up precisely those moments when I used to read. So, on Friday I focussed and began actually spending time reading. I finished reading Charles Stross’s The Jennifer Morgue, which I loved, and am now half way through Charles de Lint’s Widdershins. The Stross is fast-paced and funny, but did have me wondering why the influence of Lovecraft seems to be everywhere all of a sudden. This is probably a false observation, but with two Lovecraft pieces winning Hugos in recent years, and both novels and anthologies of fiction influenced by Lovecraft being published, he seems much more openly influential than he was a decade ago. On de Lint – I’ve been reading his stuff for 20 years, but I began approaching his work with caution about five years ago, and I skipped Spirit in the Wires altogether. I liked The Blue Girl, though, and this one is good so far.

George Martin reviews Stephen King’s Cell for The Washington Post.