<-- start self-loathing Every weekday morning, pretty much, I have coffee with my mother. This morning, as a sweet kind of reminiscence, she brought along a batch of old school reports of mine that she'd found. They covered from the beginning of school - when I was six - through till I was close to finishing school when I was maybe seventeen. It proved to be incredibly depressing. It's not so nice to see every bad trait that you thought you had repeated year after year after year in report comments. Seems like I was always lazy, disorganised, shallow and so on and so forth. At 43, sometimes you realise you get the life you (didn't) work for. end self-loathing -->

Just around New Year’s Lou Anders blogged about Chris Roberson’s terrific PS Publishing novella The Voyage of Night Shining White. Having just read the story, I was interested to hear about Lou’s connection with the story, with Chris’s ‘Celestial Empire’ sequence of stories and so on.

I was particularly interested in Lou’s retelling of how Stephan Martiniere had done some cover art for a now-abandoned edition of The Voyage of Night Shining White. I checked it out on Stephan’s site, and thought it was a pretty amazing piece of art, and something clicked. I was starting into getting the next edition of Best Short Novels ready and we needed a cover. I dropped Andy Wheeler at the Book Club an email. He loved the art too, and so did his art people. The result? Stephan’s “O” is now the cover for Best Short Novels: 2007. How cool is that? I’m very grateful to Lou for pointing out the piece of art, and to Andy and Stephan for being able to make it happen. Now, all you have to do is make sure you order a copy of the anthology!