It’s public. My pal Jeff VanderMeer, and his lovely wife Ann, are to co-edit an anthology of original pirate stories for Night Shade Books. Honestly, I’ve not envied Jeff any of his editing projects until this one. This one look’s like fun. Knowing how good Jeff and Ann are as editors, and the kind of books Night Shade publish, I think this is going to be fantastic. Apparently it’s coming out in late 2007, which means we might see it for the New York World Fantasy. I think I can see a theme-party coming on. Cool.

Looks like I might have the spam problem fixed, so comments should be back.

John Scalzi was stuck at home with nothing much else to do, so he ranked the Top 50 Personal Blogs in Science Fiction. Coode Street, to my great surprise, came in at #36, which is cool, complimentary, and also fiendishly clever of Scalzi (expect to see Whatever move up as the other 49 blogs point to him ). Still, if we’re at #36, I guess there’ll have to be content again. Gah.

Well, I’ve received about four hundred items of comment spam in the past 24 hours. I’ve not been able to get a decent spam filter working and I think, until I do, I’m going to turn off commenting. Hopefully this won’t be for long. If you have a comment you’d like to make, please feel free to email me, and I’ll add it.

Cory Doctorow is writing a bimonthly column in Locus about being a writer in the 21st Century.

The first instalment, “Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet” (which appears in the July issue of Locus), is now online at Locus: Online.

You can also check out more Cory stuff at boingboing.