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.

I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts. I don’t have a lot of time to find them, and I’m not sure  I have a lot of time to listen to them, but Sean Wallace pointed out the latest instalment of Tony Smith’s Starship Sofa yesterday morning and I spent a very enjoyable time listening to Smith, Jeremy Tolbert and Jeff VanderMeer discuss all sorts of things of interest.  I’m sold. Probably the most interesting they discussed was the future of short fiction and certain magazines.  I think a lot of people were interested in the demographics for the Dell magazines (Analog & Asimov’s) and F&SF pointed out by Warren Ellis.  I was too. I have no idea if they’re remotely accurate, but if they are, they’re very interesting indeed.

Speaking of podcasts, Clarkesworld podcast Kij Johnson’s “Spar” – one of the year’s best stories.  Oh, and you can also here Johnson’s “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles” over at Tor.com.  Johnson is just writing out of her socks right now – when it someone doing a collection?!?

Over at SF Signal John DeNardo has posted the second and third parts of his three-part Mind Meld where a whole bunch of editors discuss what they do when they compile anthologies. It ran way over length I suspect (which is kinda ironic), but it is interesting and well worth reading. Today my good friend and collaborator Lou Anders and I got to enjoy, for a fleeting moment, one of the more rewarding moments that anthologists get to experience: today we delivered a new book.

It’s probably  two years since Lou and I first discussed editing a definitive swords and sorcery anthology.  Separately we’d both been following the arrival of an exciting new generation of swords and sorcery writers on the scene. Steven Erikson had broken new ground with his epic Malazan series, and had been followed by many, many others: writers like Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Richard Morgan, K.J. Parker, and James Enge.  Lou was introducing Abercrombie’s work to the US at Pyr and I was consumed by the idea that there was a big book to be done, an equivalent to The New Space Opera that I’d just finished with Gardner Dozois, which would feature new work by the hot new writers, some vital writers who’d been around for a long time, and one or two left field selections.

I’m pretty sure discussions took place at World Fantasy in Saratoga Springs in 2007.  We went home, emailed back and forth, and then put together a proposal that caught the attention of Diana Gill at HarperEos. She could see, I think, the potential in the idea and gave us the green light to go ahead (I’ll always be grateful to her for that).  Lou and I then dove into the ‘new swords and sorcery project’, drawing up lists of people who ‘must’ be in the book, people who’d be exciting, and people who’d just be surprising.  Some writers weren’t available because of scheduling or because they were consumed by enormous novel writing projects, but a gratifying number saw the potential in the book too and wanted to be involved.

Over the past year stories have drifted in, slowly, and sometimes a little late.  Writers have had to drop out, while some have come on board happily and unexpectedly. The book then changed titles.  The original title, Conquering Swords, was a placeholder. A few months ago, in discussion with Diana, Lou and I proposed Swords and Dark Magic (an intended nod of the head to the late, great Fritz Leiber – oh how we’d love to have Fafhrd and the Mouser in this book!), and we knew that it was just right for the book we were doing.  And over the last month we’ve had exciting discussions about artists (Harper have been incredible about this and I am genuinely excited to see what’ll happen) and have had confirmation that Subterranean Press will do a limited edition of the book.  It even has a publication date. July 2010.

So today we delivered the manuscript of Swords and Dark Magic to Diana.  Our job is not over. Not by a long shot. But this is a pretty special moment. Oh, and yes, the excitement reminds and Lou and I might just have been seen in a bar in Montreal muttering things quietly to ourselves about second volumes and not being done yet.  We’ll have to see.