Brief post today as I run around trying to GTD before the world eats me.  For one thing, I’ll be at ReaderCon this weekend, not participating in programming, ut mos est mea—it’s all my fault really, I would love to be on convention programming but something had to give this fall and applying for programming was it.  Next year, in Jerusalem.  Well.  Probably not in Jerusalem, unless sales of Two Serpents Rise really spike in the Holy Land.

Speaking of which, Ofir Touche Gafla’s The World of the End launched a little while back.  If you’re looking for a book that’s weird and surprising without abandoning a strong emotional through-line, this might be what you’re looking for.  Writer husband seeks wife through an afterlife that’s somehow Kafkaesque but not in a bad way, and if you’re wondering what that means, well, just read through chapter two and you’ll see.

S.M. Wheeler’s Sea Change also came out recently; it’s a powerful and weird fractured fairy tale about gender, memory, familial cruelty, and the various ways love and ambition screw us all up, among other things.  A decent chunk of the early action is set on a beach, but I wouldn’t call this a beach read exactly—get it now, and read it in autumn or spring when the world’s shifting around you.

Oh, yes, and I’m writing this via the new Laptop of Heavenly Perfection (to steal Chaz Benchley’s term)—a 2013 MacBook Air.  Just for the sake of experiment, I’ve run all day on battery power, and those commercials talking about the battery’s twelve hour life aren’t fooling around.  Exciting upgrade, especially with travel to come and a book to edit.  I had an excellent run with my 2009 MacBook Pro, but when I put this one in my backpack I don’t even notice it’s there.  And as a one-bag traveler, that’s nothing to sneer at.

Speaking of editing, it’s funny—I’ve written a first draft of another Craft Sequence book since I finished Five Eyes Break (which I think we might be calling Full Fathom Five now, for reasons), and going back & adding scenes, I can tell the difference in my prose.  A little more immediacy, a little more comfort with diving into the abyss.  Which is funny, considering the subject matter of this book.

That joke will be funny in about a year, I swear.

Anyway, all of that’s to say that if you’re at Readercon this weekend, drop me a line!  I’ll be around Saturday and Sunday.  If you’re lucky enough to be there Friday, definitely go to the linguistics panel—John Chu is there, along with other cool folks, and whatever they come up with is sure to be interesting.