My collab with Nick Mamatas, "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft", is on the Stoker preliminary ballot, which I think is a first for me. If you're in HWA, give it a read and consider giving us your vote. (Whole ballot is here.)

I finished my story! A short one, only about 2800 words once revised, called "A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness," a title I'm rather fond of. It has kinky robot sex and weird diseases (not sexually-transmitted diseases, though; something stranger and less obvious, I hope). That's three stories done so far this year, and I may manage another one before January is gone. That would be about as many stories as I wrote for the entirety of 2008, so it's a nice start to the year.

Last weekend was awesome. Friday night I went to Borderlands to see John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, who were entertaining and funny. Afterward I went out to (a very late) dinner with them and Jude of Borderlands and Jeremy of Night Shade and Nick of Mamatas and Ellen of Klages and others, where the lateness of the hour and the deliciousness of the food made everything funny and pleasant. Jeremy even gave me a lift back across to the east bay. (Saturday night I watched the baby while Heather went to see Sean Stewart and Aimee Bender read, so there was fairness all around.)

This is a pretty ridiculous week, in terms of busy-ness -- some of it's fun busy, some of it's not. We're finishing up the February year-in-review issue of A Certain Magazine, which is always a bit of a bear. It's Heather's birthday week (yay!), so I'm going to make her a cake, something I'm looking forward to. Friday -- her actual birthday -- we're taking our darling boy into the hospital for another examination under anesthesia, which is not the ideal way to spend a day of celebration. (Here's hoping surgery isn't necessary.) Tomorrow I'm taking the boy into the city to visit Nick and get a tour of the publishing company where he works, which should be cool. And somewhere in there I should do some writing and buy some groceries and cook some meals and play with my kid and do my freelancing and...