It's awesome to look at the list of nominees for this year's Crawford Award for best first book by a new fantasy writer (Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer, Alan De Niro's Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child, Theodora Goss's In The Forest of Forgetting, Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, Naomi Novik's Temeraire, and M. Rickert's Map of Dreams) and see three books by people I consider friends, another book by a person I met once and liked a lot, and another by someone I've corresponded with a tiny bit via e-mail -- the only ones I've had zero personal interaction with are Donahue and Novik. The people I consider my peers are gradually becoming more and more respected and appreciated in the field -- and they're publishing books! I feel like I'm in the middle of a golden age. There's so much great work coming out lately. Congrats to all nominees!

There's a review of Flytrap 6 at The Green Man Review. If you haven't ordered a copy yet, do so here. We've only got a small stack of copies left.

Charles Stross has a good entry on full-time writing. Yeah, I still want to write full time. I've got no illusions, believe me, but writing full time would still suck less than any other job I can conceive of (except for ice cream taster at the tropical outdoor sex pavilion, of course). I mean, at this point, I have to deal with a lot of the annoying parts of the professional writer's job anyway, plus I hold down a day job. Less day job can only be a good thing (though I do in fact like my day job -- if I must work full time, I have a sweet gig, especially now that it's only four days a week, even if they're nine-hour days).

I hope to have my credit card debt pretty fully annihilated in another year or eighteen months, barring unforeseen financial cataclysm. Assuming I can obviate my debt, and sell a couple more books for decent money (which is a big assumption, yes), full-time writing may be a possibility in a couple of years. We'll see. I tend to expect failure, because then I can only be pleasantly surprised. But it's definitely something I think about.