You thought I’d abandoned you. Don’t pretend. Sorry. Been busy.

Kicking and screaming, in October I went back to full-time paid work for four or five months. Can you say distracting? Also exhausting, what with the one-hour one-way bus commute. And yet I wrote five, yes five, ambitious stories in that stretch. “Then We Went There.” “Like Spinning Stars, Like Flowers.” “Tattooed Love Boys.” “Liam and the Wild Fairy.” “Liam and the Ordinary Boy.” (The latter two are the first in a series of, I expect, seven or eight.) None has yet been accepted for publication but I’ll keep trying.

I also entered discussion with the lovely and talented Steve Berman (who really needs to update his web presence, Steve, even more than I do), writer, raconteur, friend, impresario of Lethe Press, about a collection of fantastical stories to be published sometime in 2011. At first I thought it might be called Not Here. Not Now. but that was before I knew there would be more than one Liam story. Liam in the World, and Others now seems a more likely title.

Discussion, did I say? Plenty of discussions. Besides critiquing each other’s writing back and forth, commiserating about our love lives (signal lack thereof), and snarking at each other’s cats, I mean. Business discussions. I proofread/copyedited a couple of books for Lethe, got named Grand High Panjandrum of Copy on the masthead of Lethe’s quarterly Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. One of the books I copyedited you should immediately order: Sandra McDonald’s winsome, whimsical, fiercely beautiful Diana Comet and Other Improbable Tales. Dead-tree edition due 1 June; various e-book editons already available, I believe. It’s really good. Really, really good. If you don’t believe me, read the title story as first published at Strange Horizons, and then thank me.

Yo ho. And then, having extricated myself from actual employment, I somehow found myself designing books. (Steve was overwhelming Lethe’s regular designer, the estimable [and Lambda Literary Award-winning, wearing his writer hat] Toby Johnson). See here for a sampling of my designs so far. And allow me to pimp one. They’re all fine books in their own ways—that Steve Berman: he has taste—but I’ve fallen head over heels only for Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Stories by Andrew Ramer. Unexpected, that: I’m not Jewish, not spiritually minded, had never heard of Andrew or the international best-seller Ask Your Angels he co-authored. And yet Queering the Text queered my world. It’s a treasure, a pearl of great worth. (So is Andrew.) You will thank yourself for reading it. Truly.

While I’m at the pimping and updating: several nice reviews of Safe as Houses have materialized on the web since Lethe reissued it last winter. @ Steve Reads. @ Out in Print. @ Three Dollar Bill Reviews.

But also! Since getting back to work on it in early April, I’ve written some 25K words/ten more chapters of the unexpected thing. I really think it probable I’ll complete a draft this summer.

And! You’ve been wondering about that map of the sci-fi planet Rahab at the top of the page? Any of you old skiffy dinosaurs remember the Ace Doubles of the fifties, sixties, and seventies of the last century? Chris Fletcher, whose awesome ’zine M-BRANE SF published “Jannicke’s Cat” in November, and who has been issuing some very interesting s-f books on the side, is toying with the notion of reviving that format.

The first release, tentatively scheduled for July, will feature on one side a short novel by Brandon Bell (I don’t yet know the title), on the other my own novella “The New People,” part one of the temporarily stalled larger worker in progress A Boy’s History of the World. So, yeah. Details as I get ’em. Or keep an eye on the M-BRANE blog if I fall into another pit.