The hole.  I told you about the hole, didn’t I?  How a hole opened up in the backyard some months back, possibly where an old sceptic tank had been? Well, it’s getting filled right now.  It’s effing huge.  Looks like it’s gonna take several cubic metres of dirt to fill.  Near as we can tell they didn’t fill in the old tank at all, so now we just sit back and pour $$s into it until it stops. Yay.

On other news, we bought a lounge suite last weekend. The sofa will be delivered tomorrow, and the rest of it in about a month, which is good.  We, Marianne and I, also went to see Bill Bailey on Monday night and he was hilarious.  Nothing much on the SF front, but that’s fine.  Waiting for news on various projects, but basically head down and working.

Last Thursday Harry Turtledove confirmed that, sadly, we were going to have to pull his story from Eclipse Two. This was a possibility we’d been discussing since he first submitted the story, was entirely amicable, and had to do with negotiating permissions for some quotes that he’d used. It was disappointing news, but hopefully the story will appear elsewhere and he’ll be back for Eclipse Three.

When I received Harry’s email I posted here that I had lost the story and was pondering whether to seek a replacement. This was something of an exaggeration. After all, the book is in copyedits and will be published in time for World Fantasy in Calgary this October, so performing major surgery on the manuscript didn’t seem a practical option.

However, two readers of this this blog were clearly more optimistic and I received two late submissions, one on Friday and one on Saturday. I was delighted with both stories and could see how they’d fit into the book I’d compiled. After some quick communications with Night Shade, we decided we could make it work – the stories could go into the book if I was quick. So, yesterday I spent part of Father’s Day redoing the main manuscript for the book, adding in new stories and author’s notes and such, and the book is suddenly redone.

The two new stories are “Night of the Firstlings” by Margo Lanagan, a short fantasy, and “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang, a longer SF tale. I love both stories and can’t wait to hear what readers think when the book comes out. The lineup for the book is now:

1. The Hero, Karl Schroeder
2. Turing’s Apples, Stephen Baxter
3. Invisible Empire of Ascending Light, Ken Scholes
4. Michael Laurits is: Drowning, Paul Cornell
5. Night of the Firstlings, Margo Lanagan
6. Elevator, Nancy Kress
7. The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm, Daryl Gregory
8. Exhalation, Ted Chiang
9. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, David Moles
10. The Rabbi’s Hobby, Peter S. Beagle
11. The Seventh Expression of the Robot General, Jeffrey Ford
12. Skin Deep, Richard Parks
13. Ex Cathedra, Tony Daniel
14. Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose, Terry Dowling
15. Fury, Alastair Reynolds

I’m hoping we’ll have some kind of launch in Calgary, though I’m not sure. A handful of us will be there, and it’d certainly be barrels of fun. Either way, my thanks to Margo, Ted, Jeremy, Ross and Marty for letting these changes happen, and to Harry for being so good to deal with. I think E2 is a terrific book, and am excited about the way E3 is shaping up.

Amended to add: If I sent you a sneek copy of the ms, let me know and I’ll send a replacement.  I’ll get e-copies out ASAP once copyedits are done.

Time and alcohol draw a veil over many things: specific dates, exactly who was there, precisely what was played. Still, I watched a documentary on the making of The Go-Betweens extraordinary final album, 16 Lovers Lane, and was motivated to send a shout out from the blog to my friend, Russell B. Farr.

Sometime during my semi-social years, back before I was married and actually lived on Coode Street, Russell B. Farr bought some tickets to go see Robert Forster and Grant W. McLennan play in a fleabitten pit underneath His Majesty’s Theatre on Hay Street in downtown Perth.

The building is wedding cake affair, lovely and perfect. The venue was basically a subterranean bar into which several hundred soon-to-be-sweaty folk could be pressed. Farr told me I was going. I aquiesced – as I recall – out of good manners. Karen might have come along, but I don’t recall right now. I knew of The Go-Betweens, but had paid no attention to them when they were a live band (they were outside my Countdown centred world). I only really knew of McLennan from his solo material (an album the title of which now escapes me ).

Anyhow, I was dragged into this fleapit and was given a revelation. From “Cattle and Cain” to “Streets of our Town” to “Lee Remick”. It was marvelous, transcendant – one of the great music experiences of my life. So, my thanks to Russell for a gift I cannot repay. And, one more spin down lovers lane.

Colin Barnett, recently reinstalled leader of the WA Liberal Party, says he believes that the WA electorate has stated that it wants the Liberal Party to the govern.  This was said not long after current Premier, Allen Carpenter, had said that things were so close that the most likely outcome was a hung parliament.  While the outcome lies in some combination of postal votes, preferences, and the whim of the National Party, it seems interesting to me that that it didn’t occur to Barnett that maybe what the electorate was saying was that it wasn’t all that fussed about either option. Certainly, that was my take.

The Liberal Party has, appparently, won the Western Australian State Election. I don’t know what I think.  I guess Alan Carpenterfailed to impress.