The Sunday Round-Up

So this week I managed to finish reading Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion, start reading Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine, watched the third season of The Big Bangtheory, and went down to the Gold Coast to spend some time with my dad while he makes his way through the three months of rehabilitation that follow open heart surgery. I worked a whole bunch and got to play with the company website. I tried to write fiction without any real success: 2,500 words total for eight days of work. I had a long fight with my local vendor of mobile phones after the phone they sold me under the promise that it would do everything my old phone did proved to be false, yet this wasn’t deemed sufficient to replace the phone for something else. I managed to lose track of what day it was twice, getting messages from people asking “dude, where are you?” while I sat there going “what? Come on, it’s only Tuesday, isn’t it?”

All in all, the events of the last month have left me weary and my one-coffee-a-day regime is well and truly gone. So in lieu of actual content, let me recommend some stuff:

– The Writer and the Critic podcast – Author Kirstyn McDermott and critic Ian Mond recommend books to one-another and get together every month to talk about that. It’s just kicked off with a discussion of Marcus Zusak’s The Book Theif and Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, and given that its’ two smart and articulate people discussing books they love it’s immediately joined my list of weekly podcast listening.
– Elizabeth Bear discussing a trunk story and how it ended up there. This is a post from 2004 that I’ve had bookmarked forever because it’s a pretty damn useful discussion of why some stories just don’t work despite the fact that there’s nothing inherently wrong with them.
– Laura Goodin’s advice on Moderating Con Panels which she put together in the aftermath of Worldcon a few months ago, but I’ve been too slack busy to read until now.
– Review’s of Sprawl over on ASif, including some nice things said about my story One Saturday Night, With Angel.
– And I’m going recommend subscribing to Daily Science Fiction now, both because I’ve been enjoying a bunch of the stories they’ve been putting out lately and it’ll save time in the first half of 2011 when I’m all like “dudes, I’ve got this story coming out, and you need to go here to read it.”