Hey -- only one more week until it's "Wannoshay Day!" Mark your calendars. My first novel (under my own name, that is) comes out in exactly one week. You can pre-order (or pre-odor if you wanna) over at the Amazon page for The Wannoshay Cycle. Starting to get excited about this one...

And while you're at Amazon (or your other favorite place to buy books online, or even at an actual bookstore, where you have to walk inside and pick up the darn things and flip through 'em), you really should check out Greg Frost's Shadowbridge, the first in a two-part series that has an amazing cover, and promises to tell an amazing story about people on another world, connected by "infinite bridges that uncoil across the oceans of Shadowbridge." I'm trying not to read too much about it so I can enjoy the whole thing when I get my copy, but the reviews have been wonderful. You can even read some of chapter 1, for free! Greg was one of my Clarion teachers, and he really helped me with my two Wannoshay stories I wrote there (in 1996!), so it's fitting that his book comes out right about the same time as mine. I think we've both been working on these books for a while!

Moving on to other writers I admire and respect, I want to post a link to a wonderful story by Michael Bishop available online in its entirety at the Subterranean Press web site: "The Pile." This fascinating bit of urban fantasy came about as a result of some notes Michael's son Jamie had put together about a strange collection of discarded objects and forgotten items nicknamed "the Pile" that sat next to a Dumpster at a condo complex, and the story that resulted is clever, funny, dark, and very, very reminiscent of Jamies artistic style. Here's a taste:

The Pile remained an attraction, though, and neither Roger nor Renata could resist going out there periodically to see what had manifested on, or departed from, it.

Roger, although good at his job, found his IT work only intermittently satisfying (“We’re all trapped in the tar pit of technology,” he once told his unamused boss); and so The Pile became for him not only a resource for items with which to furnish or decorate their place, but also a source of stuff that he could repair, remake, or put to good aesthetic use in imaginative artifacts of his own creation.

I loved this story.

Also, please take a look at some of Michael Bishop's non-fiction, in a recent op-ed piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which also involves his son and my friend Jamie: "Sensible gun laws needed."

I have no other comments, beyond that. Just give your loved ones an extra hug and a kiss and enjoy your day. Later...