Jim Van Pelt -- who is among other things a fine writer and the man in charge of the Campbell-Eligible Authors website -- wrote a few days ago to tell me he wants to reprint my story "Living with the Harpy" in a how-to book he's writing about plot. Marvelous! One of my favorite how-to books is Robin Wilson's Paragons, which has some great stories followed by essays about the mechanics of the stories, and this sounds like a similar approach. I'm looking forward to seeing the book.

We picked up our copies of Flytrap 2 yesterday. After I finished staggering at the cost (it was $90 more than they'd quoted me because they forgot about the cost of stapling when they gave me their quote! Gah!), I was delighted. It looks better than Flytrap #1. We went with a matte cover this time, so the ink isn't smeary on the cover as it was on issue #1. We've switched our headline fonts for a cleaner style. The image reproduction is mostly marvelous (and the one place where it's sub-par is our fault for putting too much contrast in a picture, but it's just a photo of us on the editorial page, so it's not that important). I've found a couple of typos so far, which is annoying, but not debilitating.

Copies probably won't mail to subscribers or contributors for a couple of weeks (and given that we're not scheduled to premiere until Wiscon over Memorial Day weekend, they shouldn't be expecting them any earlier, particularly). We're just too busy with various things to have a mailing-preparation-night just now. But if you order a copy now, it will be mailed along with all the others. Lots of our writers are going to be at Wiscon, so we're bringing contributor copies with us -- so if you're in issue #2, and you're going to be at the convention, find us, and we'll give you your Flytrappage! And copies will be for sale in the Dealer's Room at a table or two, natch.

I think we have a line on a printer for issue #3, too, a more affordable one, and one who does good quality work. That'll help us save a little in the future. In the meantime, I'm a little financially... well, not strapped, exactly, but, let us say, winded... and thus I'm waiting patiently for some of the writing money I'm expecting to come in so I can pay Flytrap contributors. There are checks for various things coming, so it'll be fine, but I rather hope that one or two of those checks arrives within the next couple of weeks, so I can have lots of money to spend on books at Wiscon!