Today was not a great day.  We’re three days out from Swancon and I’m coming down with a bug.  Yay.  Also I was at work and found out that an allowance I’ve been receiving comes to an end at the end of the month.  That means a significant drop in pay.  The best outcome for this is that I get my job reclassified or am the successful applicant for another related job in the same area.  This means a drop in family income for at least two months, and possibly for quite some time.  What does this mean? Well, suddenly the entire 2008 calendar is under review. Things we were going to do definitely have been moved to the maybe list.  The maybes are probably gone altogether.  I had planned to take four months of work, starting in July and continuing to early November.  That’s now very much under review.  I’d also planned to go to WorldCon in Denver and World Fantasy in Calgary.  Denver is definite, but Calgary has been moved into the maybe column — something I’m not happy about.

Where to from here? A lot of HR paperwork and keeping my fingers crossed that some book proposals that are out there find a home.   Joy.

I seem to have sent out an awful lot of email over the past week, to which I have received no response at all. Very odd.

I remember when I first encountered Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. I was still in high school and a family friend was working his way through the five ‘Swords’ story collections that had been published at that point. On his recommendation I picked up an anthology with “Ill Met in Lankhmar”. I was immediately sucked in by the dark, weird story and by the relationship between the seven foot tall Northern barbarian and the small, mercurial thief and former wizard’s apprentice.

As soon as I’d finished the story, I forced my mother to take me to the nearest bookstore where I could get Swords and Devilitry, Swords Against Death, and the other books in the series. The adventures of this unlikely pair have always seemed to me to be the purest stuff of swords and sorcery, the best the subgenre has had to offer. The only book that ever really competed was Michael Shea’s 1982 collection Nifft the Lean. The stories were if anything darker and weirder than the adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Nifft wasn’t especially likable, but it too was the pure quill, the real deal.

Looking back after nearly seventeen years reading for reviews and I guess twelve years reading for year’s best anthologies, I’m struck by the fact that these were cycles of short stories. The modern swords and sorcery, as exemplified by Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch and so on, is very much a thing of long novels and longer story cycles. Very few writers are attempting to put the kind of depth and complexity into their swords and sorcery short stories today that Leiber, Shea, Moorcock with Elric and others were a quarter century and more ago.

Well, last year Garth Nix wrote a story that may be the beginnings of something very special indeed. The April 2007 issue of Baen’s Universe included his novelette “Sir Hereward and Mr Fitz Go to War Again”, a wonderful piece of stuff about the tall and reasonably handsome Sir Hereward and his partner in crime, the weird sorcerous puppet Mr Fitz. I won’t go into any details about the story, other than to say it’s been nominated for a handful of awards already, is in at least one year’s best anthology, and you can read it here for free.

And that brings us to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s forthcoming pirate anthology, Fast Ships, Black Sails. The book closes with a long novelette (or short novella), “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarskoe”. It’s the second “Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz” adventure and is probably my favorite story by Nix to date. A swords and sorcery tale very much in the mode of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, it opens with our two heroes attempting to resurrect a mission gone awry by taking ship with a particularly fearsome pirate who has intercepted some of the equipment that the pair need in order to traverse the Secret Channels, storm the Sea Gate built by the scholar-pirates of Sarskoe, and enter their long hidden fortress. Much follows – cannibalism, betrayal, sorcerous battles and even deicide – in what really is a marvelous story.

How good is it? Well, it’s worth the $14.95 price tag for Fast Ships, Black Sails by itself. Quite honestly, were you to hate every other story in the anthology (and you won’t) you’d still be in front.  I’ve heard that likely we will hear more from Hereward and Fitz, so pre-order the anthology now, and join me in the wait for more from this intrepid duo.

As readers of this blog know, I was happily inundated with submissions for Eclipse during February.  I am slowly and carefully working my way through the submissions, and hope to get them finished by the end of the month, though it might take a little longer.

By way of an update, I’ve just sent the second round of responses out to authors. If you’ve not heard from me by today, that means I’ve read your story, considered it, and have set it aside to read it a second time. I hope to get back to you, one by one, over the next few weeks.

As to how things overall are progressing, I received a total of 438 valid submissions during February, and a further 47 after the closing date.  The 47 received after the closing date were returned.  Of the 438 valid submissions, I have responded to 391 authors and still have 47 submissions on hand.

If you have not heard from me by tomorrow and have any queries regarding your submission, please do not hesitate to email me.

Last Saturday I’d decided I wasn’t going to go to the Denver WorldCon. This was not a decision which seems to have taken well. On Sunday I was talking to CHARLES, and made a just-in-case room reservation because all of the hotels for WorldCon are filling up.  On Tuesday I decided I’d go.  There are lots of reasons, but it became a very good idea all of a sudden.  This morning I booked and paid for my flights, in what seems to me to be unprecedentedly short period of time.  Maybe it was last year’s experience of booking without a travel agent, but I’m done.  I fly into Denver with the Locus crew just after lunch time on Tuesday 5 August and fly out just around dinner time on Monda 11 August.  All I need to do now is buy my membership, and I’m done (though I wouldn’t mind switching my room res. for one in the main hotel).  I’m actually a little shell-shocked.  If you’re going to be in Denver for the big crazy fest, drop me a line and we can try to get together.  I’m eager to see as many people as possible.