It’s the second day of September here in cold and rainy Perth, Western Australia. It is, nominally at least, Spring. Nothing’s springing outside though, and I’m doing my best to pay NO ATTENTION at all to how late we are in the year.  Yesterday Terry Dowling and I delivered Hard Luck Diggings, the fourth volume of Jack Vance’s work that we’ve co-edited, to Bill Shafer at Subterranean Press. It’s basically a collection of Vance’s earlier works, some a bit rougher round the edges and some not often collected. It was fun to do, and there’s some possibility we made do another.
Delivering that book, however, hasn’t made much of a dent in the ‘to do’ list, which still includes delivering Swords and Dark Magic (the book that was Conquering Swords) and Legends of Australian Fantasy to two very patient publishers, completing that special issue of Subterranean Online , signing off on the ToCs for The Best of Fritz Leiber and Wings of Fire, following up Life on Mars and Engineering Infinity, and getting started (!) on the Robinson and Haldeman books. Busy busy. And it’s time to get some Locus editing done, with the year in review coming up in the background like a freight train, and to continue (hah!) reading for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 4. Oh, and there’s the steampunk book. Need to find a replacement lead writer for it. Yay!
Still, you know, that paragraph tells you how things are going here. Yes, it’s 7am on a cold, rainy Wednesday morning. Yes, I’m at the office getting ready for work on the day job. Yes, the house needs organised and the car needs replaced. Yes, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. But. But. I’m working. Things are good. I need to back the pace off a little (which I’ve said I’d do before) so that I can enjoy it more, but when I get to think about it I enjoy what I’m doing.  Shortly, when I get my head clear, I’m going to send out those invites for Eclipse Four and if neither of the two proposals I have in development sell, I might just leave post-Easter next year as only having that book and the year’s best to do. It might be a good survival mechanism. We’ll see.