Life, she is good! Pizza is good. Beer is good. Sunshine, good. New Kelly Link stories are especially good! We got ARCs of her new collection Magic For Beginners at work, and I've been reading the original stories on my lunch breaks -- "Zombie Contingency Plans," so creepy! "The Great Divorce" is also very nice. And "Magic for Beginners" might be my favorite Kelly Link story ever. I wish it had gone on twice as long. I wish it were a novel. It's very strange and beautiful and sad and cool.

Yesterday evening, for reasons somewhat complicated, I wound up sitting in Jack London Square down by Oakland's waterfront, outside Barnes & Noble, reading the first hundred pages of The Divided Crown by Isabel Glass (better known as Lisa Goldstein). Mmm, it's yummy. The previous book in the series, Daughter of Exile, was neat and fun, but this book is darker and more weighty and more immersive and stranger. It would stand alone well, too -- a few of the characters continue over from the first book, set fifteen years earlier, but it's not a direct sequel. I'm looking forward to finishing it.

So um. Let's see. We got galleys of the new Dozois "Year's Best" anthology at work, and as always I flipped back to the Honorable Mentions list to see how I did; since I write fantasy, I'll never be in the anthology, but Gardner mentions fantasy stories in the HM, and I generally get a nod there. This time I had four stories mentioned -- "In A Glass Casket", "Hart and Boot", "Terrible Ones", and "Helljack" (with Mike Jasper). That's four of the five stories I published last year -- not a bad hit rate! (Though oddly the one story I did last year not mentioned is "Life in Stone", which is appearing in another Year's Best anthology!)

I got my WisCon programming schedule (hurray, it's only a month away!). I wasn't asked to appear on any panels. Consider me dissed. But I will be taking part in a reading: Magical and Monstrous YAs (magical stories for monsters of all ages), on Sunday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. Heather, Greg, and Jenn (who all write YA stuff on purpose) will be reading, too, and I'll read from one of my stories with a young protagonist, since people often tell me some of those are YA stories, even though I never plan them that way.

I wish I could go to more conventions this year. I wish I could go to the Nebulas, with all my peeps. Ah, well.