Good morning, world. I know you didn’t ask, but I was woken at 3am by my seven-year-old daughter, who wanted me to help her get her covers back on her bed. I have not been able to get back to sleep, so I prepare for the day. I’ve been less than 100% the last few days, feeling a bit light-headed and odd. I think it’s the darned multi-focals, which also seem to be making reading more difficult and less fun.

That said, I forge on. Today, work. Tomorrow, the beloved wife’s *actual* birthday. Friday the family celebration of same. And then stuff on the weekend. I continue to push to find time to do things, but we shall see.

And reading? Well, I’m reading Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound, dipped into Interfictions 2 last night, and just finished re-reading Citizen of the Galaxy. Hmmm. In truth, right now I feel like reading some old stuff, but the mountains of new novels keep piling up.

It’s Father’s Day here in Australia. I’ve had a lovely morning. Sleeping in sort of happened, and I’m doing a little reading before getting ready for lunch. We were going to see a movie, but that’s moved to next weekend.

I’m currently reading for The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, so they’re sitting beside my chair in the front room so that I can spend time re-reading possibly contenders and going back and forth with Stan about what can and can’t go into the book. “A Short, Sharp Shock” fell by the wayside, as did “Green Mars” (sadly). But the book will be filled with great stories like “Black Air”, “The Blind Geometer”, and more. It should be awesome.  Basically, we have a list of about 185,000 words that we’re whittling down to 160,000 and then we can move into preparing the manuscript.  The book should be really terrific.

Every Saturday or Sunday morning for the best part of seven years I would call Charles Brown in Oakland. The ostensible reason was to discuss reviews editing for Locus, something we did discuss.  We would talk about events of interest in the field, books we were interested in, books he had that I’d not seen yet, and books that we loved.  Again and again we’d circle around, discussing this and that: our mutual admiration for Citizen of the Galaxy, our love for the novels of  Tim Powers, and many, many other things. One book that came up again and again was The Past Through Tomorrow,  which collects Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘Future History’ stories.  It’s an essential book, a fascinating book, and one that we both loved.  When I was in Oakland I’d amuse Charles by admiring this signed first edition, and bemoan the fact that I only have a dog-eared old NEL paperback of the book. I’d hoped that the Virginia Edition might offer some good options, but that doesn’t seem like a good option. And now I’m thinking, I just might have to fork over a couple hundred bucks and get myself a first edition. If there’s a copy in the World Fantasy dealer’s room, I just might come home significantly poorer. I think I might need it.

There’s a lot of good free reading out there on the web.  Lots of people, especially the good folk at SF Signal, provide links to a lot of it.  Two stood out for me today.  Some years back I spent a very pleasant afternoon at Charles Brown’s house, chatting with Robert Jordan and his wife Harriet.  Jordan was funny, humble, and truly gentlemanly that day, where he spent some time talking about the final Wheel of Time book that he was about to write.  Tor.com have just posted the first chapter of that novel, as envisaged by Jordan and completed by Brandon Sanderson.  You can read it here.

At the same time, the incredibly awesome Scott Lynch (who has a story in Swords and Dark Magic!) is giving his readers something to tide them over till his next book – a new novel you can read online for free!!!  It’s called Queen of the Iron Sands, a pulp SF adventure set on Mars.  I should totally ask him to write me a Mars story!

What else? I read Holly Black’s terrific “The Coldest Girl in Cold Town” the other day, and followed it with Pat Cadigan’s story in Poe. Someone somewhere should do a collection of her short stuff.  Speaking of shorts, btw, I’m finally getting to work on The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson.  I’ve been dawdling and delaying because of deadlines, but I’m delighted to finally be moving this one forward.

It’s the second day of September here in cold and rainy Perth, Western Australia.  It is, nominally at least, Spring. Nothing’s springing outside though, and I’m doing my best to pay NO ATTENTION at all to how late we are in the year.   Yesterday Terry Dowling and I delivered Hard Luck Diggings, the fourth volume of Jack Vance’s work that we’ve co-edited, to Bill Shafer at Subterranean Press. It’s basically a collection of Vance’s earlier works, some a bit rougher round the edges and some not often collected.  It was fun to do, and there’s some possibility we made do another.

Delivering that book, however, hasn’t made much of a dent in the ‘to do’ list, which still includes delivering Swords and Dark Magic (the book that was Conquering Swords) and Legends of Australian Fantasy to two very patient publishers, completing that special issue of Subterranean Online , signing off on the ToCs for The Best of Fritz Leiber and Wings of Fire, following up Life on Mars and Engineering Infinity, and getting started (!) on the Robinson and Haldeman books. Busy busy. And it’s time to get some Locus editing done, with the year in review coming up in the background like a freight train, and to continue (hah!) reading for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 4.  Oh, and there’s the steampunk book. Need to find a replacement lead writer for it. Yay!

Still, you know, that paragraph tells you how things are going here.  Yes, it’s 7am on a cold, rainy Wednesday morning.  Yes, I’m at the office getting ready for work on the day job.  Yes, the house needs organised and the car needs replaced. Yes, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. But. But. I’m working. Things are good. I need to back the pace off a little (which I’ve said I’d do before) so that I can enjoy it more, but when I get to think about it I enjoy what I’m doing.   Shortly, when I get my head clear, I’m going to send out those invites for Eclipse Four and if neither of the two proposals I have in development sell, I might just leave post-Easter next year as only having that book and the year’s best to do. It might be a good survival mechanism.  We’ll see.