Marianne and I have been pretty busy of late, so here’s something we prepared earlier…

sean wallace sent me a copy of holly phillips widely admired new collection, in the palace of repose, which was greatly appreciated. it arrived last week, but I only got around to it last night after finishing holly black’s valiant (it’s an all-holly weekend), and so far it’s terrific. as good as they say, which is saying something.

I have been in ongoing negotiations with Byron Preiss of ibooks inc. and Martin H. Greenberg of Tekno Books for some months now to develop a line of year’s best annuals that I truly believe will revolutionise science fiction and fantasy in the early 21st century.

As we all know, these are exciting times but challenging days lie ahead, and no one is likely to be more challenged than the average reader. With that in mind, I have developed a solution to everyone’s reading problems, a line of carefully focussed, niche ‘year’s bests’. While I wasn’t going to announce the details of those plans for a while, you can now see all about them at Locus: Online.

i have not had an uninterrupted night’s sleep since friday of last week. kid stuff. i am very tired. will capitalise again later. yawn.

Nature continues it’s ‘Futures’ series of short-shorts with:

• “Last Man Standing”, Xaviera Young
• “Heartwired”, Joe Haldeman
• “Dreadnought”, Justina Robson

Unfortunately, since my last post on this, they have blocked off web access so I haven’t read the last couple stories.