I like to discuss things. It helps me to discover my own opinions. That may seem like an odd thing to say, but I find that I can only question myself so much, and then talking about whatever I’m thinking about or working on helps. I don’t think it necessarily changes my view, but it helps me to clarify what I think and to understand my own point of view better because I have to explain it (even if only to myself).  That’s what I’ve been doing lately. Developing opinions, testing them, revising them and becoming clearer about what I think.

As regular Coode Streeters know, I’ve been reading and reading for the year’s best, and had entered the official ‘panic’ stage of the process. When I was collaborating with Karen Haber this happened behind closed doors, because we could bounce thoughts back and forth between us. Now it tends to overflow here, and to dominate discussions at home a bit.  Anyhow, with your help and discussions with Marianne, Gary, Nick, Blue Tyson, and the LSSOE crew, I’ve now moved out of the official ‘panic’ stage and into the ‘I’m actually doing this now’ stage. What does this mean? Well, I have 200,000 words of book to fill. I have a main story list covering about 225,000 words of stories, and a secondary list of maybe another dozen stories.  I’m currently re-reading, cutting, balancing. Asking myself, does this long story need to go in? Do I really want two stories with ghosts in them?  That sort of thing. The way I’m going, with luck, I’ll have a near final list by the end of next week. The first contracts for stories will go out next week, with the remainder going out in the first week of next month. It definitely looks like I’ll have the final list of stories by 1 October, all writers will have been contacted by then, and contracts will be in train. That’ll give me three weeks to source electronic texts, and to write the introductory materials. It’s a little tight, but it’s definitely doable.