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.

I had nothing else to do, so when publisher Bill Schafer suggested that Terry Dowling and I sign up again to do a Jack Vance project for him I didn’t really hesitate.  Well, okay, I hesitated for a moment because I do have one or two things on . Anyhow, Terry and I are editing The Jack Vance Reader for Subterranean, which will three of Vance’s best shorter novels. The novels have been selected (but not announced yet), Terry and I are providing a main volume introduction, a guest introducer will preface each novel, and the wonderful Tom Kidd will provide a new cover. I’m quite excited about this one. For news from Subterranean on this and their other Vance projects, check out their announcement.

I was discussing reading short fiction over on girliejones livejournal, and it was suggested it would be useful if I kept a listing of new anthologies coming out next year. The idea was this would allow interested readers to be aware of and possibly even buy new upcoming anthologies, and might help reviewers etc. who also might need to find them.

It sounded reasonable to me, so I’ve set up a page here that will list all of the original anthologies coming out next year.  I’ll do what I can to find all of the anthologies I can, but you can help. Please drop me an email at jstrahan (at) iinet (dot) au and let me know if you have a book coming out. If your anthology is all-reprint, it’s outside my remit. If, however, it contains at least some original fiction I’ll be happy to list it and to link to it.