Just around New Year’s Lou Anders blogged about Chris Roberson’s terrific PS Publishing novella The Voyage of Night Shining White. Having just read the story, I was interested to hear about Lou’s connection with the story, with Chris’s ‘Celestial Empire’ sequence of stories and so on.
I was particularly interested in Lou’s retelling of how Stephan Martiniere had done some cover art for a now-abandoned edition of The Voyage of Night Shining White. I checked it out on Stephan’s site, and thought it was a pretty amazing piece of art, and something clicked. I was starting into getting the next edition of Best Short Novels ready and we needed a cover. I dropped Andy Wheeler at the Book Club an email. He loved the art too, and so did his art people. The result? Stephan’s “O” is now the cover for Best Short Novels: 2007. How cool is that? I’m very grateful to Lou for pointing out the piece of art, and to Andy and Stephan for being able to make it happen. Now, all you have to do is make sure you order a copy of the anthology!
So, today: got flap copy to write for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year; need to take a second look at the copyedits for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling; need to write the intro and story notes for Best Short Novels: 2007; need to do all of the contracts for Best Short Novels: 2007; need to come up with image/cover suggestions for The Starry Rift; need to write a follow on email to the potential contributors to Universe 1; need to edit 20,000+ words of reviews for the March Locus; and there’s the day job as well. No wonder my head exploded.
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve been invited to be a guest at Conflux 4 in Canberra this September/October. I was incredibly lucky last year and got to spend a couple days at Conflux 3 and had a great time, so I couldn’t be happier to be able to go again this time around. What makes it even greater is that my fellow guests Garth Nix, Simon Brown, Sharyn November, and Graham Joyce are some of the nicest and coolest people on the planet. This, hopefully, means I’ll get a chance to hang out with them a bit, and that I’ll get to meet everyone else who’ll be attending. Hmm. Maybe a place for that editor’s workshop thing I was talking about…?
PS: I’ll also be attending World Fantasy in October/November (yay!) and will probably drop into Swancon this year for a few hours. Let me know if you’d like to catch up.
Following my brief sojourn on the ASIF forums, I’ve been thinking about some of the things you might cover in a Clarion for editors, or at least in a decent workshop for people who want to become editors in the genre. Now, this is the sort of thing that needs to be taught by David Hartwell or Patrick Nielsen Hayden or Gardner Dozois – those kind of people. Still… I note that Kathryn Cramer has posted a useful ‘how to’ for writing author bios. It’s useful stuff. Check it out.
