Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan.

It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that’s probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline.

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There’s a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog, which is  not the kind of blog you’d expect it to be from the title and entirely safe for work. I keep meaning to point people towards reviews of my story in Eclipse 4 as well, but every time I think about it I’m writing a bit of the blog during a coffee break at the dayjob, far away from the bookmarks where I group such things together and keep them handy for linkage.

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I kept trying to disappear into the bunker over the weekend, but somehow events conspired to ensure I never really made it there. I kept being distracted by, say, dinner with my sister and our friend VillainousMog who was visiting from London for the first time in two years and made for some excellent company.

On Sunday I was distracted by sleep and goodreads and the search for a good hotdog and the usual Sunday night gaming session, which meant I hit the end of the weekend feeling oddly relaxed and socialised and in possession of about three thousand words to account for two days work.

Which isn’t bad, I’ll grant you that, but isn’t really the stuff of a heroic effort in the word-bunker either. Still, the novel has a shape forming that’s actually novel-like, and the short story I’m working on hit a point where I figured out what it wanted to do, and I suspect that this afternoon I’ll get back hitting 2,500 words in a day, if only because I’ve run out of distractions and large portions of my house are now clean.

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I started reading China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun over the weekened, which was going swimmingly until such time as I hit one of those things that makes me go “oh, really? We’re doing that? Okay, I guess,” and then suddenly be much less interested in the book.

It’s the sort of thing that happens to me and books all the time. I’ll be enjoying myself immensely and then, out of nowhere, there’s be a parenthetical aside in a third-person narration, and I’ll find my enjoyment deflated and listless from there on. Un Lun Dun doesn’t do the parenthetical aside thing, but it introduces a concept and bit of wordplay that’s distracting enough that I can’t get back into the story.

It’s like that moment when you’re at a party, having a good time, then you realise that you’re actually quite drunk and you can’t get your equilibrium back once that realisation happens.

Still, I persevere, slightly less enthused than I was before, but still enjoying myself. And because The City and The City was brilliant and full of words that didn’t alienate me, and so I’ll trust in pretty much anything Miéville does after that.

And because, more often than not,  Miéville manages the opposite thing, where the right word or concept is introduced at exactly the right time, and thus there is a moment of joy to be had.

So about six months ago I won the Best New Talent Ditmar, and I have to admit that I’m rather fond of the trophy. It’s a clean design and it’s got a nice weight to it, and it makes for a nigh-perfect book-end on the brag shelf in my living room. Plus its not made of glass like the Aurealis Award, so it’s somewhat easier to photograph with the camera in my mobile phone.

I didn’t really expect to win it, so it was rather nice when it happened, even if I was so convinced I wouldn’t win that I wandered off to have dinner with friends instead of going to the ceremony. At the time my name was announced, I was tucking into a particularly good hamburger at a nearby restaurant.

Oops.

On the plus side, at least I was surprised.

I mention this for two reasons. The first is that my dad’s health problems hit not long after Worldcon last year, which means I’m not entirely sure I got around to thanking all the people who actually put me on the ballot to begin with and then voted for me. It’s further complicated by the fact that I have no idea who they might have been, ’cause I was quietly believing that no-one actually read what I wrote at the time.

To those people, whoever you were, thank you. The trophy is both shiny and useful and it’s always rather nice when someone says “hey, good job.”

The other reason is so I can mention that the Ditmar awards are fan-run, fan-voted, and fan-nominated and the online nomination forms are over here, plus instructions for doing things the old fashioned way if you’re so inclined.

Should you be stuck on some categories, allow me to throw out some names.

Best New Writer: Christopher Green, L. L. Hannett, Thoraiya Dyer
Best Collected Work: Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories
Best Fan Writer: Robert Hood for the Undead Backbrain.

There’s more, of course, but that’s a taste of where my nominations are going. Three brilliant writers, one absolutely gorgeous short fiction collection, and a blog that feeds my love of giant monsters and zombies. You are, of course, encouraged to make up your own mind. Just close your eyes, ask yourself what work you’ve read in 2010 that truly blew your mind, then put the answer in the appropriate spot. It’s actually pretty easy.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t regret the hamburger. It really was amazing.

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The latest issue of the Edge of Propinquity is out, including part 2 of the Flotsam series, Warnings. The brief goes something like this:

Keith Murphy needs information about his boss and the seer Bruce Mim is his best bet for getting it. Unfortunately Mim is one of the Other, native to the Gloom, and a deal must be struck before Keith learns what he needs to know.

Feel free to go read, or go back to the start of the series. Then send scholars who know what they’re talking about to scold me for my blatent mishandling of myth.

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Wait a second. I’m off to make coffee.

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If you haven’t been following Hark, A Vagrant lately I suggest you duck over and take a look at the Young Ada Lovelace comic and the Crazy Nancy Drew valentine’s day sketches. It remains the smartest webcomic I follow at the moment, and the most willing to make the audiance work to get the joke. The Ada Lovelace wikipedia page may help, but if you’re anything like me you’re going to finish reading and wonder why no-one has yet done a steampunk story about the unrequited love between Lovelace and Babbage, their passion ultimately thwarted by her vampiric father, Lord Byron.

There’s a reason I don’t mess around with history much when I write. Leave me alone with a wiki for five minutes and I’ll have John Flamsteed prostituting himself to aliens before you know it.

And since I’m on a roll, another link – a while back I used the sneaky back-channel of email to convince my friend Laura Goodin to write a blog post about juggling in response to a post by Seth Godin about juggling. She’s also admitted I was right: A Princess of Mars is complete pants.

It’s also been pointed out that the youtube clip I put into yesterday’s post have some issues playing, so I’ll provide a directly link to the How to Be Alone video and trust you all to defy conventional netwriting wisdom and follow a link purely because I said it’s one of those beautiful peices everyone should see. Rather than risk embedding a second non-functioning youtube clip I’m also going to post a direct link to a clip of Bad Wine and Lemon Cake, the Jane Austen Argument song that finally broke me and convinced me I could buy MP3s instead of CDs.

My neighbours, of course, have no need to follow the link. They’ve probably been hearing the song bleed through the walls for a week now.

Finally, there may be signs that I will achieve my teenage ambition to be notorious over in the final thirty seconds of the Salon Futura interview with Weird Tales editor Ann VanderMeer. My inner Oscar Wilde is greatly appeased.

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I really did make coffee, btw. I’m also really fond of this particular mug.

Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently took up the position of fiction editor for Cosmos magazine. Should you come across them in bar, they may look remarkably like these two:

Should you not know Ben, you will just have to imagine him, for he’s not among the photographs on my phone (such are the perils of being an elusive gentlemen). I can point out that he edits a zine with one of the quirkiest titles in Australia and he’s known for his damn fine taste in writers.

- ahem -

Er, sorry, the spokesbear gets snarky when I sneak that sort of thing into blog posts. He also points out that I should publicly thank Cat for coming up with the title Horn back in 2007, back when TPP and I were stumped in terms of possible titles that would work for the weird little noir novel about unicorns. My original title, and many of the replacement titles that followed, were awful and far less pointed than Cat’s suggestion.

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A friend of mine from uni pointed out that the Motel I was talking about in yesterday’s post is still in existence, although there’s no real reports on whether it’s still got its alien-abduction motif going or there’s a motley crew of long-term residents in addition to the visitors using it as an actual motel. The website does feature the graphics from the gloriously kitsch signs they used though. I lived in the one featured on the left-hand side of the header.

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I recently bought Amanda Palmer’s new album, and one of the surprises on the album was a duet she did with a member of the Jane Austen Argument on the song Bad Wine and Lemon Cake. After three or four days of listening to that song, over and over, in the car I finally broke down and went searching for the band’s website.

Turns out they have an EP out.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a story – roughly once a month I’ll find myself going to a band website and checking out their list of albums and such. I tend to listen to a lot of music, after all, and it’s really only the limitations of my budget and the rapid closure of CDs stores in all my favourite shopping centres that keeps me from spending as much money on music as I do books.

Despite these limitations, I’ve been highly resistant to buying music in electronic formats. I like the tactile pleasure of having something physical to play, and I like album art and liner notes, and I generally just like CDs and cassettes and LPs before them. Plus I have the kind of luck with computers that says backing up daily isn’t actually one of those things you ought to do; it’s a necessity that keeps me from wailing and gnashing my teeth. As a general rule, I don’t buy MP3s.

It would appear I can’t make that claim anymore. And, well, I’m not entirely sure how it happened, only that it did. It’s one of the things that always leaves me envious about music – it’s much better at beguiling us than fiction is, if only because it takes far less effort on the part of the audience on the receiving end.

I still miss the album art though. And the liner notes.

My publisher’s twitter stream also informs me that they’ll be bringing the last of their Horn stocks to Worldcon. I have no idea how many books this may be, but should they run out of stock at the con it means the second print run has completely sold through. This is pretty good news, unless you happen to be at worldcon, in which case I may find myself clutching people by the lapels and asking “do *you* own a copy of Horn yet? Do ya? You should totally buy one!” in a slightly manic voice.

I shall try to retrain myself, really I shall, but I make no promises. I was barely able to contain myself when the goal was “convince lots of people to buy copies of Bleed, for it is new and shiny and avialble for the first time at Worldcon”. While I’m usually pretty good at restraining my default level of writerly craziness in public, something may well come loose in my head when I finally see both books sitting next to each other in the dealer’s room.

See you in Melbourne, should you be coming along.

In any case, today’s entry on the calender demands I remind of two things you may wish to swing by the dealer’s room and pick up at Worldcon (if you’re in attendance) or pre-order for the home-delivery goodness (if you’re not).

Item the First: Bleed

So that unicorn book I wrote? A bunch of people were all “more please” and I was all “What? For reals? Well, okay” and now Miriam Aster is on the case again. There’s less unicorn this time (possibly, like, none) but there is a talking cat and a boogie-men and dapper ex-cop mentors and a considerable amount of, well, bleeding.  And as the blog title says – bugger subtlety. And modesty. Buy my new book people, for I am rather proud of it and I have rent that needs paying (and ’cause I really want to write the third book, and sales mean the publisher says “yes” when I pitch the next odd idea).

For your edification, I give you the blurb:

For ten years ex-cop Miriam Aster has been living with her one big mistake – agreeing to kill three men for the exiled Queen of Faerie. But when an old case comes back to haunt her it brings a spectre of the past with it, forcing Aster to ally herself with a stunt-woman and a magic cat in order to rescue a kidnapped TV star from the land of Faerie and stop the half-breed sorcerer who needs Aster’s blood.

Ten years ago Miriam Aster learnt a simple lesson: when a faerie asks you to kill someone, the worst thing you can say is sure. Today she’s about to learn that worse things can happen when the past refuses to stay behind you.

And seriously, how can you say no to that cover? Preorders are available now for $12 plus postage.

Item the Second: Sprawl

And should you be in the market for a fine collection of short fiction rather than a hardboiled fey-noir novella, may I recommend the rather fine Sprawl anthology that’s also avialable for pre-order and choc-full of Australian sub-urban fantasy stories.

Once again, their is blurbage:

Sprawl is an exciting new original anthology, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and published by Twelfth Planet Press, that will give readers from around the world a unique glimpse into the strange, dark, and often wondrous magics that fill the days and nights of Australia’s dreaming cities and towns, homes and parks, and most of all, its endlessly stretching suburbs.

Table of Contents

• Liz Argall/Matt Huynh – Seed Dreams (comic)
• Peter Ball – One Saturday Night, With Angel
• Deborah Biancotti – Never Going Home
• Simon Brown – Sweep
• Stephanie Campisi – How to Select a Durian at Footscray Market
• Thoraiya Dyer – Yowie
• Dirk Flinthart – Walker
• Paul Haines – Her Gallant Needs
• L L Hannett – Weightless
• Pete Kempshall – Signature Walk
• Ben Peek – White Crocodile Jazz
• Tansy Rayner Roberts – Relentless Adaptations
• Barbara Robson – Neighbourhood Watch
• Angela Slatter – Brisneyland by Night
• Cat Sparks – All The Love in the World
• Anna Tambour – Gnawer of the Moon Seeks Summit of Paradise
• Kaaron Warren – Loss
• Sean Williams – Parched (poem)

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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 15/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

(The reprint of) Horn failed to be delivered today but I have rescheduled for tomorrow and they should then be out in the post to the preorders in tomorrow evening’s mail.

If you’ve been holding off buying your copy of Horn til they were back in stock, as of tomorrow they will be and you can buy your copy here. Again, whilst stocks last – I expect to have copies for sale at Worldcon but there were quite a few reservations for this second printing as well.

Which seems like as good a segue as we’re going to get to talk about the current state of the second Miriam Aster novella, Cold Cases.

Today I was full of virtue. I rose early, I took my daily dose of penicillin, then I settled down at the computer with a cup of coffee and a Bob Dylan CD and vowed to remain there until the problem of not having a finished version of Cold Cases  was finally solved. I have convinced myself this is doable by promising that a finished draft today means I can take tomorrow off and prepare my next D&D game before we play on Thursday.

That was about seven hours ago, and since then I’ve heard Bob sing Everybody Must Get Stoned about twelve times. It appears to be working too, but I suspect seven hours of Bob Dylan is my limit.

The upside is that I’m finally tackling the pacing problems at the end of the novella, which is a very stop-start process where I build a scene and then figure out what still needs to be done to connect it to the finale. I figure that gives at least a 60% chance of hitting the end some time tonight (the end, of course, being an arbitry stopping point where I look for beta-readers who can point out where I’ve done stupid things that need fixing).

There is some bad news for those of you thinking you know, my mother really digs noir stories with a squicky unicorn filling* and looking for a copy of Horn as a result – it’s out of stock at the moment, and while I don’t know the particulars of when the reprint will happen I’m pretty sure it won’t be in time to show your appreciation for the maternal figure/s in your life on mothers day itself. Of course, you can pre-order yourself a copy of the second printing and pick up a copy of either the Siren Beat/Roadkill double (which delivers Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Hobart noir novelette with a tentacle-squick filling and Robert Shearman’s novelette of desperately uncomfortable, captivating weirdness in one convenient package) or Dirk Flinthart’s Angel Rising (which includes warrior nuns – need I say more?) to cover Mother’s Day itself.

Or, you know, you could just pre-order a copy of Horn and give it to your mum when it’s finally released. Because you don’t actually need mother’s day to tell your mother you love her, dig?

In any case, there’s more details below. Go forth and do with this information as you will.

*Mine doesn’t, for what it’s worth. She hasn’t read Horn at all, and I’m at peace with that**.
** My grandmother, on the other hand, really enjoyed it. That surprised me a little.

*************** 

TPP Mothers Day Sale!

Also, Twelfth Planet Press has released the guidelines for their forthcoming Speakeasy anthology full of urban fantasy stories set in the 1920s.  I totally dig the idea of this anthology, but I’ll admit that all of my initial ideas will be bloody hard to pare down to short story lengths (unless, of course, I finally break down and write the 1920′s zombie story set in Tahiti I’ve been threatening to write for four years now, but Alisa at TPP is quite adamant in her hatred of zombies so it’s probably not the best starting point).

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Okay, fair warning, the following entry is rambling and scattered while I think through a specific problem related to the project du jour. If you have no real interest in writers thinking out loud, I suggest going back and following the Moorcock link above. I mean, it’s Michael frickin’ Moocock. The man is awesome.

I still have my right molar, freshly canaled after Wednesday’s trip to the dentist, and for the time-being I am free of the antibiotics and anti-inflammatories that induced last fortnight’s lethargy (although my gum’s still infected, and they may return). The rental inspection is over, I’m slowly coming to terms with my decision to stay in the flat rather than move when my lease is done. I’ve fretted about the various ways I can make enough money to not die over the coming months, although I’ve yet to come up with a solution beyond “write more, apply for more jobs, and pray.” I have considered doing the washing up and decided against it. I’ve read a bunch of things. I’ve talked myself out of three separate projects that have absolutely nothing to do with getting Cold Cases finished, nor getting Black Candy finished after that. I’ve finally sent off submissions to all the places I’ve said I’d send submission too. I’ve re-watched an entire season of the Gilmore Girls while scribbling notes on scrap paper. I have been scolded by the spokesbear. I have argued against his scolding. I have lost the argument.

I think I am, officially, out of distractions.

Which probably explains why the Cold Cases rewrite is officially underway after rebuilding the opening scene yesterday. It only amounts to a thousand words all-up, but my original aim was only three paragraphs and there’s a lot of alternative openings there should I need them in a few scenes time.

I’ve been thinking about openings quite a bit for the last few months. Personally, I blame Samuel Delany’s On Writing, in which there’s a strong argument for openings that follow a location/situation-and-action/affect structure. Fiction isn’t a film, Delany says, and the tendency to open stories with action – say, a character opening a canteen and pouring out the water – lacks impact when it’s unsupported by setting elements that give a context to that action. Setting enhances the data a reader has to work with, making each action more definitive and meaningful, but more and more people start with the action because we’re learning the structure of a story from film and television where the setting details are signified automatically as part of the medium. It’s near impossible *not* to betray setting elements when you point a camera at something, so the focus can go on the action; prose hasn’t got that ability, so the context comes first.

And to be honest, I can’t really argue with that. It’s remarkably solid advice from someone who is far smarter than me when it comes to the field of writing. And that scared the ever-loving crap out of me, because every time I sat down to work on something and I didn’t follow the setting-through-affect structure my subconscious has another tool to batter me with and make me give up. My subconscious is good at picking up on things like that, and if ever that was a writing rule worth learning it’s this: all writing advice becomes counter-productive when it gets in the way of getting stuff done.

Part of the reason this has been bugging me in relation to Cold Cases is the way it reflects Raymond Chandler’s preferred approach to an opening passage. I ransacked the small pile of his work that seems to have taken up occupancy on my bedside table last night and ran through the first paragraph of each, taking them apart in an effort to figure out what it is I liked about them and why they worked. The random sampling I came up with was pretty setting-intensive:

It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aledis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home. (Farewell, My Lovely; Raymond Chandler)

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars (The Big Sleep; Raymond Chandler)

The housewas on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leading downstairs. Upstairs windows were of the cottage type and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming them. (The High Window; Raymond Chandler) 

The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart. (The Lady in the Lake; Raymond Chandler)

Moreover, when you start reading a whole bunch of Raymond Chandler openings in a row you start to notice a series of scene-setting tricks coming out again and again. The locking-in of time, season and weather that occurs in the opening paragraph of The Big Sleep tends to occur within the first four paragraphs of most Raymond Chandler books; ditto the kind of assumed local knowledge that occurs in Farewell, My Lovely. Only once in six openings did Chandler open with a character rather than a location, and even then the location is still mentioned by the end of the first line:

 The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lenox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other. (The Long Good-Bye; Raymond Chandler)

To be fair, there’s a good reason for Chandler to break his pattern in this one. The first chapter of The Long Goodbye is essentially one long set-up for the rest of the book, establishing the friendship between Marlowe and Lennox that’ll provide a stronger context for the action when the mystery kicks off in Chapter Two. I spent a lot of time pondering that yesterday, prior to writing, and I’m pretty sure it contains the kernel of thought I needed to get out of the drafting-paralysis that set in after reading Delany’s book. Because once I slotted context into the tripartite structure he advocates instead of setting, things start to become a little clearer.

The opening paragraphs to the first Aster book, Horn, is almost pure context without any real setting details included. It largely gets away from it by being a riff on the more obvious Chandler-esque traits I noticed back when I first started reading hardboiled fiction:

The phone call came at three am, about a half-hour after the body arrived at the morgue. It didn’t wake me. I don’t sleep well, not anymore. I used to work Homicide back when my life made sense and insomnia’s one of those bad habits I picked up on the job, right up there with the cigarettes and the tendency towards one glass of gin too many. It’s just another little twitch to remind me that my body doesn’t pay attention to the lies I tell myself about the past. (Horn; Me; You can still buy it over here if you’re interested)

I suspect I get away with this kind of white-room set-up of the story because Horn is shamelessly meta-textual in its approach. At it’s core the book assumes a kind of familiarity with hardboiled/noir tropes and the tropes of unicorn fiction, and I didn’t necessarily want people to be starting with a clear image of the setting so much as a clear idea of which genre the story was situation in. It’s an easy narrative trick to pull (easy enough that I probably wasn’t conscious of it when I wrote Horn), and it probably explains why I keep getting into discussions with people about whether Horn is set in an American or an Australian setting*. Without situating the reader within the reading expectations associated with the Hardboiled genre the revelation of what killed Sally Crown at the end of Chapter One doesn’t have the same effect.

Cold Cases is a different book to Horn in a lot of ways, but the biggest is that it doesn’t revolve around the kind of bait-and-switch of genre traits that defined the first book. It’s still merging fantasy and hardboiled, but that merger isn’t the driving force that makes me want to finish the story the way it was in Horn. Which is probably just as well, since I doubt it’d work a second time (primarily because I tried, back when I made my first attempt at the sequel, and it fell flat). This time around the backdrop that’s providing a context to the action is largely Aster’s backstory and that’s a lot harder to set-up.

Yesterday was a day of experimenting with that. Still not sure I got it right, but at the very least I’ve got an idea of how to determine whether it’s doing the wrong thing once the rest of the manuscript forms up. And that’s as far as this train of thought goes before my head starts hurting and the spokesbear cracks the whip once more.

*Australian, for the record, albeit filtered through a noir lens with names changed to protect the city I based it on.

I’m okay with removing the tooth, to be honest, as long as it doesn’t come with another round on medication. Experience says I have a predilection towards sloth that shouldn’t be encouraged and I have phobias about returning to the slacker mindset that dominated my early twenties. Or, to return to my new years resolution: don’t fuck it up, dumb-ass. I’ll take a week of jaw pain over a week of sleeping any day.

My medication-induced narcolepsy would bother me less if the project du jour wasn’t doing the rewrite on Cold Cases, the second Miriam Aster novella. It’s not that I begrudge the fact that it needs rewriting – I dig rewriting – but there’s a certain element of I’d really like this to be done, now, please, when it comes to this book. I’ve lived with it for far too long* and it’s still playing coy, refusing to reveal the right beginning or structure. And it still suffers from its lingering bout of sequelitis, despite my attempts to strip out the signs of infection. Frustration abounds. Especially since I’m only paddling around in the shallow end of the rewrite, grabbing an hour here and there, rather than diving in and immersing myself in the book again.

The Spokesbear, of course, is raring to go. He’s been making notes, re-reading Horn to wrap his head around the narrative voice, and generally preparing for two weeks of total immersion in the manuscript. Impatience makes him testy and unbearable, but what can you do?

Right now, the best I can think of is go eat some porridge.

*well, not with Cold Cases specifically, but much of last year was spent thinking about the book that would follow Horn, and this is the second attempt at it.

Meanwhile, in more positive parts of internetland, the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009 has just been released. Horn got recommended in the novella section and my Strange Horizon’s story On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk is mentioned in the Short Story listing.

My mind, it is blown by this turn of events.

(Congrats also to Lisa Hannetand Paul Haines and a bunch of Twelfth Planet Press projects and a bunch of other friends I’ve probably missed, but I’m skim-reading everything right now due to the dwindling battery power).