Well, Conflux gets underway in just over a week. In fact, in a week’s time I’ll be getting ready to get on the flight to Sydney and start my day long peregrination to Canberra, which I think ends in what sounds like a fun dinner out with the other guests that night.  I don’t actually have a final schedule yet, but I think I’m doing a panel on space opera, one on the best stuff of the year, a kaffee klatch with Jack Dann on editing for editors (which I’m really looking forward to), and am going to be interviewed by Terry Dowling (who’s book I’ll also be launching). Although I’m starting the whole thing tired, I’m looking forward to it.  I hope to see a lot of old friends, and maybe make some new ones.  The editor guest of honour at these things is always something of a third wheel in my experience, so please feel free to come up and chat, ask questions or whatever. Despite all the rumours, I don’t bite. Oh, and if you’re not sure about it, please come to Canberra!  This looks to be a lovely intimate event with all kinds of cool people showing up. One of my favourite writers in the universe, Graham Joyce, will be there. He’s fantastic, and a lovely guy.  Simon Brown and Garth Nix are simply two of my favourite people on the planet, while dinner this week only confirmed how great Kevin and Rebecca willl be. So come along. It’s going to be great.

Marianne and I had a thoroughly enjoyable dinner last night with Kevin and Rebecca Anderson, who are in Australia to promote his latest Dune and ‘Saga of Seven Suns’ novels. Marianne, Kevin and Rebecca have known each other since way back in Marianne’s early days at Locus, so it was good to catch up with them and see how they’re doing.  I’ll see them both again at Conflux in less than two weeks, which looks to be a lot of fun.

We spent part of the weekend giving our new television a warm-up run. We were given a lovely 51cm television for our wedding. It’s still terrific, but it’s never quite managed to fill out living room in the current house, so last week we bought a nice 106cm flat panel. It’s definitely more like it.  I watched the Eagles lose their game on it, and saw Australia win a couple of still-managing-to-be-dull games, but basically love it. The kids also watched some very BIG Barbie movies on it :)

And now it’s definitely ‘head’s down’ time. I need to get focussed and start writing for the year’s best.  I have thirty eight days to finish three books:  The Starry Rift (some copyedits), The Jack Vance Reader (introductions etc), and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (final story selection, contracts & permissions, writing interstitial material, manuscript preparation), so I definitely need to focus.

Wow. That was incredible. Best game of football in a long time, and we lost. Gack.

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.

How do you judge the quality of a short story?  There are many ways, and you can judge a number of things, but I just finished two short stories, and this occurred to me. Be internally consistent. The first story I read was a time travel piece that opens a soon to be published anthology. It’s fine, not a bad story at all, but … it has two lead characters. They are both travelling in time. At one point character A travels back in time to effect a change to the timestream, while character B remains behind. Character B manages to notice and comment upon how character A must have been successful, because the present had changed. But, how could character B know? After all, character B was now part of the changed timestream where the original event had never occurred. It didn’t make sense, and seemed very sloppy to me. It was a  pity, because the rest of the story had much to recommend it.

Altogether more assured is John Langan’s novelette from the September F&SF, “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers”. It’s your usual post-apocalyptic running from a pack of terrible demon creatures while possibly morphing into some kind of dark hero story – we’ve all read those – but it’s very well written. I was slightly put off at first by some typographical stuff in the story, but Langan draws you very steadily and definitely through the story, building his world, and keeping his characters focussed and believable. I need to think about it a bit more – part of me wanted a bigger payoff at the the end of the story – but I liked it great deal and will definitely be keeping an eye out for his new story collection next year.  BTW, you subscribe to F&SF, right? This issue comes with Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, so you know you need to. It’s really very, very good.