It was the Best Of sales, it was the Best Of sales...

That nice Steve Berman of Lethe Press is taking my story "Villainelle" from WHEN THE VILLAIN COMES HOME and reprinting it in BEST GAY STORIES 2013.

Also, he's taking my story "Keep the Aspidochelone Floating" from THE TOUCH OF THE SEA and reprinting it in WILDE STORIES 2013.

So that's two Bests Of next year, which delights me.

Algonquin!

Did anybody ever write a triumph-and-tragedy musical about Dorothy Parker? Because I have utterly earwormed myself with "Marie of Romania", after singing it in the shower this morning. Hey-ho.

In other news, life is a medley of extemporanea. I am baking two different kinds of bread (my regular country sourdough and a couple of cinnamon-raisin-pecan loaves) while I wait for my whee!ls to arrive. Then I may have to go out shopping for helmet and lights and lock and panniers and hi-vis glittery things and possibly footwear and I don't yet know what else, before I may be allowed to cycle anywhere. And then at four o'clock m'friend Theresa is coming around with new!baby, and we're going to the Stanford Art Museum for some culture.

House of Doors: rescued!

Today's even-better news: the trade paperback of House of Doors, which was threatened with extermination before ever it saw the light of day, has been reprieved. It will be published - in "a small edition" (small in number, ie, not in size) - on 15th October. It is not impossible that this decision was in some part influenced by the number of you who have gone out of your way to pre-order it.

People, you have saved a book. Posterity and I, we are extraordinarily grateful.

Now, of course, you get the opportunity to save another. The tpb of House of Bells will depend entirely on the sales of House of Doors. We're coming up on both ghost-story season and gift-giving season. How many of your acquaintance would be grateful for a lovely trade paperback of a book set in World War 2, featuring sensible nurses and injured airmen and a very strange house and oh the hauntings? This page will guide you to where you can order House of Doors in its splendidly upcoming paperback edition, or of course you may have your own preferred retailer. Let's just get those numbers up if we can. A small edition, forsooth! Let's make them reprint. Largely.

Chaz and the art of bicycle maintenance

People, I have successfully adjusted the height of the saddle!

This, um. May be the most in bicycle maintenance that I have ever yet achieved. Except for the time that m'best friend Shiv and I took his bicycle apart entirely, to the last nut, under the firm misapprehension that we would know how to put it all back together again. Unsurprisingly, we were wrong about that. I have absolutely no memory of what he did with a yardful of bicycle parts, or how he explained it to his father.

Also, I am a little anxious, I find, about actually taking the bike outside and riding on it. I get like this, it's apparently not something you grow out of. Like when I got my first computer a quarter of a century back - no, more, nearer to thirty years - it sat in the boxes for three days before I dared unpack it and plug it in. I learned the word "procrastination" from my teacher when I was eight, when I was demonstrating the art before the blackboard in the gaze of the whole class. It's a kind of performance anxiety, I guess, that applies even when there's nobody watching. Except of course there's always somebody watching, which would be me. I am my own worst critic, apparently*, and I hate to imagine letting myself see myself fail.


*Who was it who, on hearing person X described as his own worst enemy, said "Not while I'm alive, he's not"? I've always wanted to steal that. Still waiting for the opportunity.

EtA, in the traditional manner

So I posted that last, and thought phooey. And wheeled the bike out to the front and roded it, all the way to the bottom of the street and round to the next and up to the top. And then back down and around, 'cos I didn't fancy the main road at the top, with all that traffic and me a little wobbly and poor on etiquette and rights of way and so forth. And I didn't - quite - fall off even at the start, before I had faith enough to go fast enough not to do that; and I remembered to ride on the wrong other sides of the road, both ways; and there was a car and everything*, and neither of us came close to hitting each other; and really it's just like being thirteen again and getting my first and last sensible bike. Though this is probably the only one I ever had that was the right size for me.


*Yes, just the one. Now I am suddenly grateful to be living in a very quiet suburb.