Lou Anders and I delivered our fantasy anthology, Swords and Dark Magic: The New Swords and Sorcery to HarperCollins in New York several weeks ago. We needed to finalise a few details first, but we’re now ready to announce the final table of contents for the book.

1. Introduction, Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan
2. “Goats of Glory”, Steven Erikson
3. “Tides Elba:  A Tale of the Black Company”, Glen Cook
4. “Bloodsport”, Gene Wolfe
5. “The Singing Spear”, James Enge
6. “A Wizard of Wiscezan”, C.J. Cherryh
7. “A Rich Full Week”, K. J. Parker
8. “A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet”, Garth Nix
9. “Red Pearls: An Elric Story”, Michael Moorcock
10. “The Deification of Dal Bamore”, Tim Lebbon
11. “Dark Times at the Midnight Market”, Robert Silverberg
12. “The Undefiled”, Greg Keyes
13. “Dapple Hew the Tint Master”, Michael Shea
14. “In the Stacks”, Scott Lynch
15. “Two Lions, A Witch, and the War-Robe”, Tanith Lee
16. “The Sea Troll’s Daughter”, Caitlin R Kiernan
17. “Thieves of Daring”, Bill Willingham
18. “The Fool Jobs”, Joe Abercrombie

While  there’s always someone else who could be in a book like this, we’re delighted with the quality of the stories we received, grateful to the authors for being involved and to our publisher for supporting the book.  It’ll be out next July and is fabulous!  Oh, and there’ll be a limited edition done by Subterranean Press too, which should be awesome in its own right.

ETA: And Lou’s announcement is here.

One of the projects I’m working on is reprint collection of dragon stories, Wings of Fire, for Night Shade Books. It’s due in the second half of 2010 and they’ve just sent me the absolutely awesome Todd Lockwood artwork. When you think that it’s a book of dragon stories you can see why this is perfect. I should have the near-final cover design shortly and will post it when I do. I love this.

Well, you can now pre-order Swords and Dark Magic over at Amazon.com which is exciting and makes the whole thing seem very real all of a sudden.  There’s still a lot of work to do – proofreading, copyediting etc – but the book will be out in June. We’re looking at cover roughs now – Diana Gill at HarperCollins has been incredibly kind and open to input on that – and hope to announce the table of contents just as soon as she gives the ok (which I imagine will be in the next week).  The ToC will be announced simultaneously here and over at Lou’s blog. I know I’ve mentioned different dates on this, btw, but the moment Harper says its ok to announce, it’ll be online. We’re very excited about this book.

I am becoming a grumpy contrarian.  I bought tickets to see Elvis Costello play a solo gig at the Fremantle Arts Centre.  At the end of a long day, I realised, the last thing I wanted to do was drive for an hour, see a performance of the Secret, Profane and Sugarcane album, get home at 11pm, and be exhausted at work all the next day.  Yes, it seemed like a good idea when I bought the tickets, but it didn’t at 4pm yesterday.

But, it was fricking awesome!!  Stephen and I hoed down to Fremantle and got there around 5pm.  We parked on the street across the road from the tiny venue (EC played on the ‘South Lawn’ of the Arts Centre, out of doors on a cool evening, to about 1,500 people).  After ascertaining details, we wandered towards downtown Freo where we stumbled across an organic Japanese teahouse (it’s Fremantle, of course we did). Great food was imbibed over chatting about upcoming music events etc, and then back to the venue.  We arrived just after the doors opened, so the best seats were gone. We were forced to sit right in front of the stage, nine rows back (70 feet?). Awful!  The support act, Shelley Harland, was perfectly pleasant, but everyone was waiting for the star.

Costello strode onto the small stage at 8pm wearing a jaunty hat, waved at the crowd and launched into a spirited rendition of “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and didn’t falter in his stride for the next hour and a half as he tore through new materials, classics, and odd covers. You can see the full setlist here, but highlights included an unexpected “Indoor Fireworks” (one of my fave EC tracks of all time), a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise” (he’d just played it with the Boss the previous week for the Spectacle),  a beautiful performance of “Good Year for the Roses”, and many, many more. It was one of the best shows I’ve seen in years, and if he had done a second show tonight I’d be there.  Truly a wonderful experience.

I am seriously pondering what I want to do as an editor over the next five years.  This, I should assure you, is a totally new thing for me. Until quite recently I have been an almost entirely instinctive creature when it comes to editing. I’ve not thought in terms of ‘career’ or the next right step, or even what I want to be doing in a while. Instead I’ve been led by my enthusiasm, which has served me well.

However, I’ve known for a while that I want to be a fiction editor for a long time. I’m signed up. I expect, should the world allow me to, to be doing this until I die.  Realising that, and as I’ve begun to think it just might be possible, has led me to ponder what it is I want to be doing. I love science fiction and fantasy. You couldn’t read what I read and stay sane if you didn’t.  I  want to do things to advance and improve the field, open doors to new writers, and create books that are interesting and challenging, books that are part of the ever-evolving dialogue of the field.

That means I’m completely committed to my two Night Shade projects, the year’s best and Eclipse (though for different reasons), and to Locus.  Again, assuming other factors allow, I suspect I’m a lifer (or at least a long-timer) on both.  However, there are other challenges. I’m not walking away from anthology editing, but I’ve begun to think about what I could do in the magazine arena. I spent the best part of ten years working on a fiction semi-prozine in the 1990s, and I really did think I was done with that.  The past few years have been so busy, so challenging, and so rewarding, I never even considered it.

And yet, suddenly, I find myself thinking about how I might approach a new science fiction magazine. About look and feel, fiction/nonfiction balance etc.  I even think quite a lot about editing online. I think I would love to edit an online magazine, one devoted to finding and developing the best science fiction stories. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance – I don’t feel like I have the resources right now to do it – but I think I would love doing it again.