Some time this year Peter Beagle turns sixty-eight. Even though he’s nowhere near the oldest guy out there writing science fiction or fantasy, he’s getting up there. And yet, somehow, even though he’s sixty-eight and has been publishing first rank work since before I was born, he’s still producing fiction that wins awards, gets critically raved about and, more importantly, is loved by readers everywhere. I mean, he wrote The Last Unicorn in the late ’60s and “Two Hearts” in 2005, The Folk of the Air in 1986 and Tamsin in 1999. He’s a seriously impressive writer, and one of the best fantasists we’ve ever seen.

Which got me to thinking. I don’t think this is inappropriate. After all, the judges haven’t been empanelled yet, and if they have, they haven’t been announced and I certainly don’t know who they are, so… how about Beagle for the World Fantasy Award? Not for best novelette for “Salt Wine” or “El Regalo” (though both would be worthy nominees in my opinion), but for Life Achievement. I don’t know how many people deserve to be recognised for lifetime achievement by the World Fantasy Convention, but Beagle would have to be one of them. A writing career that stretches back nearly fifty years, at least one genuine world straddling classic, and a very, very impressive body of work. I really hope he gets considered.

PS: As a booklover and Beagle reader, I’d love to see a treasury of his best short fiction. I’m probably alone, but it’d be something really special.

What do you do when you have a series of deadlines looking you in the eye? Sensibly, you prioritise, deal with those things that are most important or urgent, and slowly get on top of your to do list. Unless, of course, you’re me. If you’re me, you start going “la, la, la, la”, dip into about six or seven different things, none of which you should be doing, and then suddenly go “oh, f*#k”, I need to get that done. That is why, instead of diligently copyediting Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling yesterday, I was watching Australia play New Zealand in Hobart.

It’s also why I’m having so much difficulty committing to a reading project. It’s not the fault of anything that I’m reading, but I’m just sort of idly, desultorily moving from one thing to another. Last week I started to read Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois’s new young adult fantasy anthology Wizards (to be published in the UK as Dark Alchemy), which contains stories by some of my favorite writers, period. I’ve read the opening stories by Gaiman, Nix, Rosenblum, Baker and Colfer, and have stories by people like Jeff Ford, Liz Hand, Andy Duncan, Gene Wolfe, and Terry Dowling to look forward to. And yet, I’m kinda stalled. I’ve got a ream of print out to read, and am pushing to stay focussed.

I also was recently sent a copy of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Daughter Of Hounds. It opens gangbusters, and looks to be seriously terrific. Dark, gripping, and real edge of your seat weirdness. I’ve loved every bit of it that I’ve read so far: all eighty or ninety pages. And yet, as much as I’m loving it, the need to proofread or edit or send out contracts or something pulls me away. Sometimes I think I’ve developed a short attention span problem, and I just need to sit down and not get up till I’ve read a lot. Who knows… Good book, so far, though.

The other thing this weekend was that I did something to my neck. Spent hours with heat packs on it, and am almost human again today. Everything will change tomorrow. I’ll be working from home, so I’ll copyedit a couple hundred pages of Sterling, get Bill his cover blurb (sorry!), call CHARLES (sorry!), and get some other stuff. I’m also going to post a competition thing here, do some more stuff over at ASIF, and work on developing a few other projects.

Sophie came into this morning look all tousled and cute. I took her picture using the laptop camera. She says this photo is for her nanny (aka grandma), who she loves very much.

Jessica decided my office is where the wild things are. She’s sitting in my office chair. Behind her, stacks of books that somehow must leave the house.

I’ve been discussing editing, anthologies, Australian science fiction and so on over at Alisa Krasnostein’s Australian Specfic in Focus, as part of their Focus on Editors. Feel free to drop by and say hi.