Speaking as a private citizen, my problem with voting at tomorrow’s Federal election is that I don’t want to vote for ANY of the candidates. We seem to be offered the choice between reprobates and the reprehensible, the insincere and the unconvincing, the dishonest and the dissolute. I suspect that the only real wish of mine that might be granted tomorrow is that the Australian Democrats could lose their status as a political party. That, at least, would be a consolation.

I’m feeling a bit dazed this morning. Somehow we always manage to lose track of time. It’s about four weeks to Christmas, and the next week or two are going to be consumed by preparations for Jessica and Sophie’s end of year ballet and acrobatics performances. We’ve got a half day rehearsal this Sunday, a rehearsal next week, one all day next Sunday, then a dress rehearsal, then two performances of the three hour long show. I get tired just thinking about it, and Marianne’s got to do it! The five minutes of stage time the girls will clock up will be brilliant, but this does seem the hard way to do things,.

My mum’s due out of hospital tomorrow, which is a great thing. Her surgery seems to have gone well, and she is in good spirits. I’m not sure she expected to be coming home at all, so it’s been a great thing to see it all work out. I’ve been going over to her house every morning to water the garden and all of that stuff. This morning I decided to see if I could get ten minutes at a coffee shop before starting work. That’s where this photo was taken.

What next for me? Well, I need to work out Christmas menus. The family are coming to our house, which will be great, but we need to do something nice. Also I want to work out some fun things for the girls to do. Usually our family events are pretty dull for them. There are six or seven adults, and two little kids. I think games or something would make it work. Maybe I’ll ask Uncle Stevie to do that . I also need to get more work done on Recommended Reading, draft my essay for Locus, write three book proposals, and give some thought to actually reading. On that front, no sign of Matter yet. Sigh.

Over at Ecstatic Days, JeffV mentions that he’s just re-read Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, and is delighted to find that it holds up today. I’ve been working with Vance material over the past eighteen months, and I’m really happy to hear that other readers are finding it as fresh and vital as I am.  A discussion that’s been going round the backrooms of the Locus offices for the past year is just how influential both Vance and Philip Jose Farmer have proven to be.  At one point, time looked to have passed them both by, but more and more it’s becoming clear they’ve had an enormous impact on the field.  I hope someone reprints The Best of Philip Jose Farmer in a trade edition soon.

Amazon have released their new e-book reader, the Kindle, this week. It’s of absolutely no relevance here in Australia because it’s not offered for sale here, we don’t have our own Amazon store, and we can’t use the wireless network it’s based on.  That said, a thought or two.  It seems unreasonable to say that something is or isn’t going to be successful when it’s only just been released, but a couple things did occur to me. First, it’s the coolest name for a new device since Microsoft released the Zune.  Second, neat use of ’70s retro styling.  Way to go. And, third: who wants another dedicated device for reading?  Isn’t it obvious that the category killer here will be a nice, cool looking object that is a phone, a music player, a video player, a websurfing thing and an ebook reader? It’s not that we can’t carry the Kindle. It’s that we can’t carry it with our cell phone, our iPod, our camera, our Blackberry and whatever else we may or may not have.  One object to rule them all. That’s what we need.

Well, I’ve done exactly one of the things I’d intended to do since I got back from the States. This morning I emailed out the first draft of the Locus Short Fiction Recommended Reading List. Lest you think that I simply make this list up, it starts with a large list of stories sourced from a variety of recommenders (the most important, at this stage, being the monthly recommendations published in Locus selected by our two short fiction reviewers, Nick Gevers and Rich Horton). The draft list then goes through a number of iterations, with comments and recommendations sought from our reviewers, experts in the field and so on. By the time it’s done it will probably have been through eight or ten iterations, and had input from most of the major short fiction people in the field.  It will, of course, still overlook a story or two, but I think it ends up being the best source of short fiction recommendations in the field.  I’ll keep you up to date on progress with it in the coming months, as we lead up to the February 2008 issue of the magazine.

Other than that, the main thing here is that my mother is in hospital.  This was long scheduled, but still is a difficult thing.  She’s almost seventy and needed surgery, and both she and her doctor’s were very concerned about complications arising from medication and so on. I spoke to her last night and this morning, and she sounded okay but very weak.  Today’s main thing, apart from getting ready for the return to work tomorrow, is visiting her in hospital.  I have my fingers crossed that she’ll be home by this coming weekend and on the mend.

What else? I’ve been watching the cricket, faithfully not reading, and keeping my eyes peeled for Iain Banks’s Matter popping through the mailbox. What else can you do? More soon…