The countdown is well and truly on.  Tomorrow morning, Tuesday, I head out to Perth Airport and begin then big World Fantasy Adventure for 2009. For those who don’t already know, I think World Fantasy is the best, most fun convention on Earth.  I haven’t been to every convention, and friends certainly say good things about Readercon and ICFA and other places, but WFC is the one for me.

The trip will start at 9.00am with a flight to Sydney. I will, of course, mean to blog a lot about the trip and to take photos. I definitely will mean to.  Based on previous experience, though, you might get one or two posts from airports and such, but not much more.  And, unless I buy a camera in the duty free area at Sydney Airport on Wednesday, the only photos will be taken using Photobook on the Macbook, but who knows?  I’d like to do more.

The plans right now include going to Nick Stathopoulos’s ‘Toy Porn’ art exhibit in Sydney, sharing a flight with Cat and Sean to San Francisco, and then dinners, parties and all sorts of things in San Jose.  Should be awesome.

I should add that I’m away until Wednesday, 4 November.  What that means is that I will pay at least cursory attention to email and so on during that time. I am sorry about this, and will check in daily for urgent stuff, but essentially I’ll be gone for the week.

If you live in sunny Perth, Western Australia you must surely know about Planet Books, my personal pick for the best bookstore in Australia. Well, they have always been incredibly supporters of my books (hi Alan, Robin, Alison and everyone else!) and they are currently running a special offer on The New Space Opera 2. If you buy a copy of the book they’ll give you a copy of The New Space Opera or Dreaming Again (your choice, I think).

And just to prove that running a completely awesome bookshop isn’t enough to prove how great they are, Robin says that “if anyone comes in (like today) and says they bought Space Opera 2 we will give them a copy of Space Opera 1)!  This is until they run out of current stock.  So, hie yourselves down to Mt Lawley, pick up NSO2 and browse the shelves.  It really ia a great bookstore.

And this just in: the advanced uncorrected proof of Mirror Kingdoms, the Peter Beagle ‘best of’ collection that I edited, dropped through the mailbox today. I’m delighted! Subterranean will publish it early 2010 with a cover by Wm. Michael Kaluta. The table of contents is over on the Subterranean website and, even if I do say so, this is a very fine book.  Beagle, who has always been one of our finest novelists, has developed into one of our finest short story writers too.

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.