If you’re eligible to nominate, the nominations for the Hugo Awards closes on Friday.  You can nominate here.  I did my nominations a couple weeks ago, and if you can, you should do yours too.  Don’t worry about having seen or read everything, just nominate something (anything) that you think is worthy.  It’s a cool thing to do, and speaking from personal experience, it’s a pretty special thing.

When I was in Oakland last fall I spent an afternoon sitting on the official Locus Back Deck ™, chatting with Charles Brown and Jeremy Lassen and, I think, committing myself to enough book projects to keep me busy until my pension arrives.

As is often the way with the book world, while things are started in haste, they often take a somewhat slower path to fruition.  One of those projects, however, is just about ready to unveil so I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention it here.  Wings of Fire takes its inspiration from the big retrospective anthologies that John Joseph Adams – a fine anthologist in his own right and the Night Shade PR guy – has edited for the Shade.  It will include about 200,000 words or so of stories that feature dragons.  The stories may be fantasy, may be SF, or horror, or whatever, but they’ll definitely feature dragons.  The book is tentatively scheduled for early 2010. It’s one of several such books I’m likely to be doing for the Shade, and I’m pleased as punch to be doing it.

And there’s something you can do to help.  I’m seeking recommendations from readers and writers of any dragon stories that you have loved.   I’ve set up a database for recommendations (http://tinyurl.com/d2evez) and will be using them as the basis for the book (I do have a list but I’m eager to get as many recommendations as possible. I’d also give a nod to John Joseph Adams (again), who showed me how to set up the database and whose template I borrowed heavily from.  It’s my hope, if there’s space, to include a list of all recommenders in the acknowledgements to the book.

I was copyediting Locus’s forthcoming books listing last week when I came across the listing for Stan Robinson’s new novel, Galileo’s Dream. I knew the book was in progress, but didn’t know it was due so soon  (August, which means galleys v. soon!).  I can’t wait to see it. I love Stan’s work. The cover above was on Amazon.

It arrived!!!  The issue of Alphabet Soup with Sophie’s story dropped through the mailbbox today and she was thrilled!  Opened it up, pored over it, loved the illustration, and felt very proud of herself.  A big family moment.

For year’s I’ve been going to www.fsfmag.com to get my Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction online fix.  Recently they changed the address to www.fandsf.com. I wasn’t paying attention, of course, so I ended up with the Florida Sports Fishing magazine, which was confusing. Update your links!