Odds and Ends

Sorry for the silence around here recently -- some very sudden things came up at work, and though I'm officially on sabbatical, too much was going to affect work next year for me to avoid participating. That coupled with the start of a new term at Dartmouth and a couple deadlines for pretty comprehensive articles about 2005's books and stories (for Locus Online and Vector -- the first will be published within the coming weeks, the second one I don't know the scheduled date for, but it's a much juicier article and filled with things to argue with) didn't give me any time to do much more than send the occasional email. Then I even fell behind in email, so if you haven't heard from me this week and expected to, I apologize.

It's looking like I'm going to be busier than I expected over the coming weeks and perhaps even months, so blogging may be a bit spotty, but I doubt I'll disappear completely (though I do know how).

Jeff VanderMeer's been putting a bunch of good things up on his blog recently. There's Ann VanderMeer's favorite music of 2005 (she knows her music), great news about one of my favorite editors (plus a killer photo), an endorsement of Delany's About Writing (which I told him to read, ha ha!), and one thing that deserves some extended comment...

Jeff writes a fine chronicle of the couple of days he and Ann spent up here in the frozen north with Eric Schaller, Paulette Werger, me, some hedgehogs, a turtle, and some drunk locals. (And despite what Jeff says, we were not the drunk locals. Most of us were quite restrained in our consumption of intoxicating beverages, especially in comparison to the people around us. Oh, and that stuff in the wine glass I'm holding is Belgian beer. The apparently self-satisfied expression on my face comes from my holding my breath while waiting for Jeff to take the picture, because for some reason it took longer than I expected.)

While Jeff details his relations with Eric and Paulette's hedgehogs and turtle, he does not tell the most extraordinary story -- we had to bail him out of jail after he got arrested storming a meercat farm. He let all the meercats go, trying to save them from being turned into fur coats. People don't know about Jeff's staunch advocacy of animal rights. (Just try eating a steak in front of him!) In fact, he was considering having Leviathan 5: Don't Smoke the Bunnies! be published by PETA. Ask him about it.

In other news, Strange Horizons released their first issue of 2006, and it includes a new column I wrote in an attempt to make sure Jay Lake develops an ego. I've been worried about him.

Here are a few old links I collected in my rare forays through the internets over the past weeks:

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