I was out noodling around on youtube.com yesterday and, for reasons I can’t really explain, decided to search on Neil Gaiman, just to see what’s there. Well, as it turns out, there’s quite a bit. Neil, who’s a really entertaining speaker, travels the world talking here and there. While he’s there, perfectly nice people seem to quietly hold up their mobile phones, video what he says, and post it to youtube.com. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. You can see him being interviewed, answering questions, and even reading stories. If you search carefully, you’ll see him reading “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, which is in my new year’s best.

There are a bunch of other readings, including one of Neil’s new story “The Witch’s Headstone”, which I think ranks amongst the best stories he’s done in the past few years. As he explains in his Q&A, the story grew out of a time when he and his young family used to live across the road from a cemetery. They had no garden of their own, so Neil would take his then infant son across to the cemetery, where they’d play amongst the headstones. That led to him imagining the tale of boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard, which would eventually evolve into the book he’s now working on, The Graveyard Book. As it turns out, “The Witch’s Headstone” is one of the early chapters of The Graveyard Book, and is really quite delightful. It’s sort of Charles Addams in Bradbury’s October Country, but in England instead.

I don’t really want to say much more about it, but the best (and first) place to read it is in Jack and Gardner’s new anthology Wizards, which contains tons of other cool stuff as well. Garth Nix has a lovely story in it, one of his best, as do  Gene Wolfe, Andy Duncan, Terry Dowling and a bunch of other people. I’ve not finished the book yet, but what I have read is good. You need to check it out.

So, the Locus Recommended Reading List has hit the stands. I’ve been involved it compiling the list for a few years now, and this one was kind of different from previous years. Normally, CHARLES has hopped a plane from the icy climes of California and headed Down Under, and we have sat on the shores of the Indian Ocean, quaffed an ale or two, and worked together on turning recommendations, reviews, thoughts, and notes into what I think is the best annual overview of the genre published anywhere in the field. Unfortunately, health is making it harder and harder for CHARLES to fly to the other side of the world, and my commitments make it difficult for me to travel to California more than once a year, so this one was done via email and telephone. And, because I’m reading an insane amount of short fiction, the book list was largely assembled by CHARLES with the help of Amelia, while I co-ordinated the short fiction list. This is good, and bad. I LOVE the recommended reading list, and love being involved in it all. I also love needing to know about the field to have to read everything. This year I’d probably read fewer recommended novels than at any other time in the past twenty years or so, and I doubt this year’ll be much different. That said, I’m getting to know short fiction pretty well, I guess.  So, check out the list, vote in the poll, and subscribe. I know I’m biassed, but I think Locus is a pretty good ‘zine.

thanks to those who posted in response to the previous post. thanks too, to those who didn’t. posts like that one are why we shouldn’t have blogs. still. ever onwards…

<-- 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!