This morning was an alarm clock morning. Jolted out of sleep, staggered into the shower, got dressed in the office, then breakfast while dealing with email. Surfed the net for a few minutes until my ride arrived. One of the nice things about getting a ride is that we grab a coffee most mornings at a cafe across the road from my office. It’s too easy to not keep up with family, so it’s good to have a time most days when we can just chat. For those not in Perth, it’s been warm and humid lately, but it was nice today.

Got up to the office, logged on and such, and found an email from the agent that work’s spam filter had eaten. Interesting. It was about a prospective new project that I’d pretty much given up on, but which may still have some chance of getting up. I’ll keep you in the loop. Terry phoned at round 8am, and it looks like we’ll be having lunch today, which will be nice. He’s over from Sydney for Swancon, and it will be good to spend some time. Justin gets in Wednesday, and is overnighting at our place. He’s welcome, but I’ve got to arrange delivery of a bed so he has somewhere to sleep.

What else? Got a lovely email over the weekend from Rob Hood asking if I would launch daikaiju!, the anthology of giant monster tales he’s co-edited with Robin Pen at Swancon on Saturday. I’ve no idea what benefit they get from my being involved, or what I’m going to say, but it should be fun. It also gave me an excuse to pop over to Robin’s place to pick up the very cool looking book so I could check it out beforehand. It strikes me, at first glance, of being of a piece with books like All-Star Zeppelin Stories and Retro-Pulp Tales – great adventure stories that are supposed to be fun to read. I’ll let you know when I’ve read more.

I also spent some time reading on Sunday. Finished Patricia McKillip’s new novel, Od Magic, which deserves its own post, and basically tooled around. Busy week coming, though.

…are beginning to leak out. From what I hear, it sounds like the committee must be going through the advising nominees phase of things. Congrats to one and all. I’ll be interested to see a full list when it’s available.

…are beginning to leak out. From what I hear, it sounds like the committee must be going through the advising nominees phase of things. Congrats to one and all. I’ll be interested to see a full list when it’s available.

I recently became concerned that the blog was sounding a little bit overly self-involved. Too much about me and what I’m doing and what I’m feeling about it. Then I had a very, very, very small epiphany – an epiphanette if you will. It’s my blog. Of course it’s bloody self-involved. What else would it be?

Just re-read Alex Irvine’s “Golems of Detroit” from the May F&SF. I’ll post something intelligent about it later, but it’s a good story and the novel that it comes from looks to be a real winner (The Narrows, due in late ’05). I also just read a new Kelly Link story, “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”. I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this story. There are stories that come along every now and then, and they make me wish I could build an anthology just to house them. They excite me as a reader, an editor, a publisher. I loved the story – it’s due out in Kelly’s new collection – and you should check it out as soon as you can.

Writing is hard enough without adding stupid limitations to the process. Or at least, that’s how it seems to me as a bystander. For that reason, I’m a little bit skeptical about Nature magazine’s series of short-shorts, ‘Futures’. Surely a writer has enough to cope with, without trying to squeeze his story into a few hundred words. That said, some have done it extraordinarily well. The magazine has offered up six stories so far. Of these, I think the McIntyre is particularly good and well worth checking out.

• Ian Stewart, “Play it again, Psam“
• Stephen Baxter, “Under martian ice“
• Ken Macleod, “Undead again“
• Penelope Kim Crowther, “The party’s over“
• Vonda N. McIntyre, “A modest proposal… for the perfection of nature“
• Norman Spinrad, “A Man of the Theatre“