First, Tropism Press news. Greg van Eekhout's chapbook, Show and Tell and Other Stories, is available for pre-order. It's $6, plus $1 for shipping. We expect to have copies for sale at Worldcon, and will mail copies to those who pre-ordered by the first week of September.

It's a cool chapbook. It has a squid on the cover. It will probably have some weird little interior illustrations. The stories are, of course, fabulous, and there's a new story, "Far As You Can Go," which is one of my personal favorites, an oddball and poignant tale of a boy and his robot. If you like Greg's stuff, go make with the clicky-click.

I feel like I can announce our next chapbook project, too -- a collection of stories by our own Heather Shaw. I think she's published enough stories to create a really fine collection, and so I've convinced her to let me put together a beautiful little book for her. It should be awfully nice, and we expect to have it ready for WisCon 2007.

We might do another chapbook next year, for the fall, but I dunno. We're still mulling it over. I really like this chapbook-publishing thing, though, I gotta say.

Yesterday was ludicrous amounts of fun. Heather and I rose and did our walk to the Farmer's Market, though the heat was insanely oppressive. It's way hotter than the usual summer days. I thought I was going to collapse from the heat on the walk back (which is uphill). Still, we survived, and by mid-afternoon headed into the city to see Barth Anderson (and his lovely family!). Barth was doing a reading at Borderlands, where I was pleased to meet Adam Golaski of New Genre, one of my favorite small-press magazines. After the reading, we headed out to an Irish pub and chatted the afternoon away. Attrition shrank our group until their were only five of us left -- me, Barth, his sister-in-law, her friend, and Heather. We found a nice quiet air-conditioned bar, drank, played some pool (not artfully, but it was fun), and talked. Really nice. We usually only see Barth at WisCon, and only briefly then, so it was a treat to spend some quality time.

We got home around 9, and our house was an oven. We locked the cats in the bathroom and threw open all the doors and windows. It helped a little. But only a little.

Today we're fleeing the hottest part of the day and hiding in a cool movie theater for 2 and a half hours. We've decided to see Superman Returns... largely because it's the longest movie of the ones we're interested in seeing, and will allow the longest time to luxuriate in air-conditioning.

Hope you're all coping with the weather in your own special ways.