- I've just attempted a Great Inbox Catch-Up, so if you sent me an e-mail and haven't gotten a response, then re-send. I vow to keep up on a weekly basis (mostly) from this point forward.
- Betsy gives some love to Kekla Magoon's The Rock and the River, which I've heard nothing but good things about.
- So Lance Armstrong won't have the most stringent drug testing protocols ever. Not sure what this means.
- A new fantasy-focused news and reviews and other stuff site, The Torch, has launched. Author Brent Hartinger is writing a great deal of the content so far.
- The Interfictions 2 line-up is amazing, and what a good idea to have additional stories in an online annex. Can't wait.
- TV Show Music catalogues the tunes on various shows. No more fruitless rewinding to try and hear lyrics and then googling for half an hour. Yay.
- The Shirley Jackson Awards are holding a lottery to raise funds. At Readoncon, I saw one of the rocks given to nominees, which, in my humble opinion, is the coolest thing ever.
- An excellent interview with Lew Shiner about Black & White and various other topics. A snippet: "I've always felt that any individual book of mine is going to have more in common with my other books than with other books in the same "genre." I think the emphasis on genre comes more from publishers than readers. The readers I talk to just want to read a good book (whatever that means). It's the big conglomerate publishers who want to turn books into predictable commodities so they can sell the largest number of units each of the smallest number of titles. That doesn't serve writers or readers, it just serves the publishers — and them only in the short term."
- Jincy Willett has launched an online workshop.
- Paul Di Filippo writes about several new anthologies and the state of short fiction over at the B&N Review.
- New fantasy group blog starting up, The Magic District, and the members include Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout, so I'll be reading it. (Greg has the best novel title ever — Norse Code. I have title envy.)
- Also, note that the link to Greg's book is to IndieBound. I'm hoping to switch all my links over to Indiebound. (Except the ones in the sidebars, which self-generate to Amazon through Typepad's system. But I hold out hope that there will one day be code that enables me to do that too.)