I did a bunch of work on Greg's chapbook last night, getting the layout pretty much in shape. Nothing left now but dropping in some spot illustrations, adding original publication info, and, of course, proofreading! It's going to be really great. You can still pre-order the chapbook. You'll only have to wait five or six weeks to get it in the mail.

While I'm exhorting you to buy things that aren't printed yet, you can also pre-order Polyphony 6, which includes stories by a lot of fabulous authors, and also a story by me.

And while none of my fiction is included in either volume, I did work a bit on the production side of Jonathan Strahan's Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005 and Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005. They're also available for pre-order, from Locus Press. I can confirm that they're very fun, cool anthologies, with lots of great stories from last year.

See? Look at all the things you could have to look forward to!

Okay, here's the thing. I was going to take a couple weeks off from writing fiction. I've written a few stories this year -- it's been my most productive year in a while already, at least in terms of short fiction -- and was planning to start work on my next Marlaverse novel in August. I thought a couple of weeks of relaxation, just dealing with the day job and taking it easy on evenings and weekends, would be good for me. But I'm not relaxed. I'm antsy. I want to be writing. So I think I'm going to dive into Ferocious Dreamers this week. It's a weird book, because I've already written tens of thousands of words, but I think I'll have to throw most of them out -- my conception of the novel has changed in recent weeks. Not the plot, really -- that's fundamentally the same -- but the way I'm going to approach and reveal and explore the plot. In a way, figuring out what to keep and what to throw out from the bits I've written will be harder than writing the whole novel from scratch.

I'm considering just writing the whole novel from scratch anyway. I don't want radical shifts in tone, which could be a danger if I try to graft in old chunks of novel among the new. Hmm. Something to think about.

Or maybe I'll just write that SF YA I have an idea for. It could be fun to just plunge into that at breakneck speed.

I also have an idea for a fantasy novella, but I don't know if I'm going to write it. I'm not sure where I'd sell it, for one thing. There aren't a ton of market for 30,000 word stories. But I might just write it for fun and worry about selling it later. That's what I always used to do.

I want to be writing something, but I'm not yet settled on what. There are worse problems to have.

I guess I'll refrain from bitching about the heat. But lord, it's been hot.