My friend Kelly sold a book to my friend Sharyn, and it will include a story I bought. How awesome is that!

The Science Fiction Book Club is now accepting pre-orders for Best Short Novels: 2007. The SF Book Club’s cover is by Stephan Martiniere, a piece originally done to accompany Chris Roberson’s The Voyage of Night Shining White, but never used. The book contains eight short novels by Kage Baker, Robert Reed, Chris Roberson, Robert Charles Wilson, Ysabeau Wilce, Michael Swanwick, Cory Doctorow and Jeffrey Ford. It’ll be out in June, and I’m really happy with it. I would say, if you enjoy this series, please consider joining the Book Club and ordering it as the series future has been in doubt.

If you can’t join the Book Club, you could always consider ordering the Prime edition of the book, which will be out in September. It features the Bob Eggleton cover at the right here, which rather suggests Godzilla or one of his cohort might be in the book.

Regardless of which edition better suits you, though, I’ll be delighted if you pick up a copy. I think it’s a good book, and I’d love to have the chance to continue the series in 2008.

Well, Marianne and I rushed the kids out the door this morning, and headed into the city. She’s off getting her ‘colors done’, whatever that entails, while I’m sitting at an outdoor cafe, not getting much done. I did do a little shopping, though, and scored my own first sighting of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, right here in Perth. Woot! Itch scratched. Over it now. On to the next book.  I’m still reading, and enjoying The Coyote Road. It’s prompting a lot of thoughs about anthologies, though. About structure, about theme, about how you manage them. Before I overstate it: editing anthologies isn’t rocket science.  To do it really well, though, you need to work on developing the finer points. I’m proud of all of the books I’ve done, but I’d like to think the next ones I do will be better than the ones I’ve already done. Without that, I’m not learning much from the process.

What else? Watched the series closer for Life on Mars? last night. I’m really not sure about it at all. I won’t go into details because I know there are a lot of people who’ve still not seen it, but I’m not entirely convinced. I will watch Ashes to Ashes, though.

The kids are back at school, Marianne is out shopping, and I’m having a Firebirds morning. I’m reading the upcoming Viking/Firebirds anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, faithfully keeping my place using a Firebirds bookmark that came in the latest issue of Realms of Fantasy, while avoiding doing the editing/rewriting necessary to complete the introduction for my own Firebirds anthology, The Starry Rift, or working on the proposal for next one. The only thing I’m missing is Sharyn, who it’d be fun to talk to about all of this stuff. Manhattan later this year, though.

Dear readers,

I have this other journal, and I’ve not been good to it. It’s supposed to be the sexy wonderful site for all things year’s best, but I’ve never quite committed to it. It lives over at www.yearsbests.com. I’m going to tinker with it over the next few weeks: get the RSS feed working, make sure the site links are right, maybe play with the look. Mostly, though, I’m going to blog about reading for the years bests. I’ve not done much of that here, but I’m about to do quite a bit of it there (I think). I admit I have no self-discipline, so this might not happen, but it’s what I intended to do. Check it out if you think it might be of interest.