Marianne and I had a thoroughly enjoyable dinner last night with Kevin and Rebecca Anderson, who are in Australia to promote his latest Dune and ‘Saga of Seven Suns’ novels. Marianne, Kevin and Rebecca have known each other since way back in Marianne’s early days at Locus, so it was good to catch up with them and see how they’re doing.  I’ll see them both again at Conflux in less than two weeks, which looks to be a lot of fun.

We spent part of the weekend giving our new television a warm-up run. We were given a lovely 51cm television for our wedding. It’s still terrific, but it’s never quite managed to fill out living room in the current house, so last week we bought a nice 106cm flat panel. It’s definitely more like it.  I watched the Eagles lose their game on it, and saw Australia win a couple of still-managing-to-be-dull games, but basically love it. The kids also watched some very BIG Barbie movies on it :)

And now it’s definitely ‘head’s down’ time. I need to get focussed and start writing for the year’s best.  I have thirty eight days to finish three books:  The Starry Rift (some copyedits), The Jack Vance Reader (introductions etc), and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (final story selection, contracts & permissions, writing interstitial material, manuscript preparation), so I definitely need to focus.