When presented with a list of titles, the Powers That Be at Bantam liked Spell Games best, so that's the name of the fourth Marla Mason novel. (Thanks to Greg van Eekhout for suggesting it!)

Yesterday was a good news day -- not only did I finish my book, but I sold a story, "Hell's Lottery," to Mort Castle's magazine Doorways. "Hell's Lottery" is a very weird horror(ish) story featuring games in the afterlife, a dead protagonist, and one of my favorite recurring villains, the demon Cosmocrator. Really devout readers will remember him from my story "Bleeding West," and he's also a big player in the YA novel I'm hoping to write. (Really devout Valentian Gnostics should be warned that I just liked the name Cosmocrator, and it's not the same entity who appears in your traditions under that name.)

I did a phone interview with Jon Armstrong on Saturday (in my bathroom with the door shut, because there was some hideous loud machinery noise on the street that made it impossible to hear anywhere else in the house). Jon didn't hit me with the usual sort of questions, which was refreshing, and I hope it's interesting. Check out the interview at his podcast, "If You're Just Joining Us."