So, you ask, ‘Jonathan, you’re always complaining about being too busy. What are you actually doing?’  Well, good question, dear reader. As long-time readers know, I hold down a day job with a mysterious bureaucratic entity (no, I’m not going to name them because it’s kind of irrelevant here) in Perth, Western Australia where I perform project-managey kind of tasks in the web development area. This is a good thing. Last year I got a promotion, which was nice, and it continues to keep me busy.  The $$s also keep the family unit running, which the science fiction stuff helps with, but couldn’t maintain.

Now, how about the editing stuff, you ask? Well, there are three strands to that. Since 1997 I’ve been working in various capacities for what Tim Pratt calls ‘A Certain Magazine‘, but what others seem to see as the evil behemoth of death, that darned magazine, the evil semi-prozine Hugo eater, or sometimes just, Locus. I started as their Australian editor, which really was just cover so I could shack up with my girlfriend and get a visa. I had to sell galleys from the Locus Basement to cover costs, so it was an interesting start. Then I became a book reviewer, which I did on and off between 1997 and about 2003. I proofread the magazine for a bunch of years, and have been Reviews Editor since 2002. This means I allocate books for review (sometimes in consultation with the publisher) and edit the reviews that come in from our reviewers around the globe.  It means I’m corresponding a little every day, and then edit the columns in a rush around about now each month.

Then there are the anthologies.  I started doing that in the mid-1990s I then co-edited a pair of anthologies with Jeremy Byrne for HarperCollins Australia. I got my big break, though, from Karen and Bob Silverberg, when they brought me in to work on their year’s best SF.  I’ve since edited fourteen year’s best volumes of one stripe or another, and am finalising contracts now for the next couple. Working for Locus and doing the year’s bests led collectively to doing The Locus Awards, and some other reprint books I’m doing. My first original anthology was Eidolon 1. I’ve since completed six more, and have four in train.  The best way to follow these is to check out the Bibliography page, but coming up are Godlike Machines, The New Space Opera 2 (with Gardner), Eclipse Three, Conquering Swords (with Lou), Dreamtime: Legends of Australian Fantasy (with Jack), Life on Mars, and Engineering Infinity.  There are a couple others being discussed, but that’s most of the antho stuff.

The third, and less well known, kind of editing job I do involves assembling single author collections for various publishers. I did the first of these in 2007 when I edited The Jack Vance Treasury with Terry Dowling for Subterranean.  Truthfully, this came about because I was trying to get someone else to publish a book like that, and ended up doing it myself. I’ve since edited, or committed to edit, three further Vance books (The Jack Vance Reader, Wild Thyme, Green Magic, and Hard Luck Diggings). I also edited Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling, which was an amazing experience, and am currently working on a ‘Best of Fritz Leiber’ with Charles Brown, a collection of Walter Jon Williams stories, and am almost certainly doing three other books like this over the next year or two.  Oh, I’m also assembling a special issue of Subterranean Online.

So, that’s what’s keeping me busy. That and having a young family who like to see me occasionally too.

A couple nights ago I was trying to make myself come to grips with my (to me) endless ‘To Do’ list.  I sat down and blogged a lost of 20-odd tasks on Twitter. Task 13 was ‘Hotel reservations for Sydney and Melbourne in August’.  I was very surprised – I’m naive like that – to get a direct message from the concierge’s desk at major Sydney hotel asking if I’d like a special rate for their hotel.  We went back and forth a little, and I’ve ended up with a reasonably competitive rate that I’m considering.  I am caught wondering though, whether this is good business and a useful service or an invasion of a social space that doesn’t need it’s own form of spam.  I will say, in defence of the hotel, I had to opt in after the first contact, so they weren’t unwelcome. It was just odd.

I am more bemused than I can possibly tell you that I’ve come in at 35 on Tech Republic’s list of 50 Ubergeek’s Worth Following on Twitter. I’m glad that my micro-blogging was of interest to someone, but … it’s just odd.  For those who follow, see you over on Twitter.

The good folk at Night Shade have posted the full text of Ted Chiang’s Hugo and BSFA Award nominated story “Exhalation” in multiple formats on their website for the joy and delectation of readers everywhere. There is also a wonderful podcast of the story over at Starship Sofa. The story is from my anthology Eclipse Two. I’d like to thank Ted and Night Shade for being willing to let this happen.

Note: Link now fixed.