New Year Celebration 2012

How on earth did that happen? I promised a blog tomorrow, and that was over a week ago. I wrote an essay, and I wrote a short story, and I went to Sydney and did a reading with a string quartet, but I didn’t blog. And now I’m sitting backstage at Revolt in Melbourne preparing for a New Year’s Eve Party- Masquerade-thing and I missed my blog. So while there is wireless, there is hope, and I am writing this.

Many exciting and wonderful things have happened in the time that I have been not-blogging. For example, I was quoted by Tom Stoppard.

My story “A Case of Death and Honey” from A Study in Sherlock and the upcoming Jonathan Strahan edited anthology Best SF and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6 was written about on the Tor.com website in a way that made me happy. Short story writing is a lot like Don Marquis’s description of poetry writing as flinging rose petals into the Grand Canyon and listening for the boom. Normally there is silence, so even a little response to a short story is a good thing for an author. You can read the Tor.com piece, by Niall Alexander.
The first volume of Les Klinger’s remarkable four volume Annotated Sandman comes out in a couple of weeks: reserve your copies from your local comic store or bookshop now.