News for August, or ‘Who Hath Not Seen Thee Oft Amid Thy Online Store?’

In the parching August wind cornfields bow the head, sheltered in round valley depths on low hills outspread, and I have been moderately busy. I went on holiday, came back, spent time at Loncon, came back from that. Here's a round-up post of news.

1: is that I have finally rolled up the scroll named 'Punkadiddle'. As you'll see at the end of that link, the best of the old blog is now printed up in a book, £3:42 from amazon online store as e-book, so: you know. Buy! Buy! Buy!

2. I have agreed to act as a judge for next year's Kitschies, which (a) means my own novels are guaranteed NO place on the shortlist, hurrah! (or, wait ... boo?) and (b) a Niagara of books has begun flowing through my front door. The good news is that I get to swap aesthetic judgment with the rest of the panel, all of whom are considerably cooler than I: Kate Griffin, Kim Curran, Frances Hardinge and Glen Mehn. The downside is: it's a lot of reading. There's another downside, which I'm thinking of converting into an upside. You know what they say: when life gives you lemons and industrial quantities of sugar -- make lemonade. Often, after I read a book, I'll write (and blog) a quick review, Writing out my thoughts makes those thoughts clear in my head. Writing, I fear, comes more naturally to me than thinking. So I figured: what if I reviewed every title? Last year I believe the K.s had more than 300 submissions, so I'd be committing myself to a peck of work. But I could turn into a project. Like Magnetic Fields writing and releasing 69 Love Songs. I could do 369 Love Songs: SFF Novels Editions. What do you reckon?

If I review 369 titles at, say, 500 words per review (which if I'm honest is the shorter end of my horribly prolix reviewing habit), we'd be looking at 185,000 words. That would make an interesting e-book: The Complete Science Fiction and Fantasy Output of 2014 Reviewed! (I don't doubt there are many more than 369 SFF titles released in any one year; but it would be a broader sample than the usual review collection manages, and might be interesting to do). At any rate I've made a start: check out the August entries over on the SibFric blog. This may putter out, or gather prodigious steam. I'm honestly not sure.

3. At Loncon Ian Whates launched a book with a story by me (and stories by others, more noteworthy than I) in it: mine being 'Baedecker’s Fermi' in Paradox: Stories of the Fermi Paradox ...

He also launched Sibilant Fricative: the Book. As I mentioned above: Buy! Buy! Buy!

4. Another thing I did this summer was write a 'How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy' book, for the people who used to publish the 'Teach Yourself' franchise, but who have now rebranded them as 'Get Started In'. The proofs for said book came in this week.

5. I also wrote something long-ish for Jared Shurin that may appear as a book-length publication at some later point. I'm quite proud of it actually, but pride is a sin, and I don't want to compound my sinfulness by dilating on the matter here.