Getting to Know You--Again!

In the windup to the release of Mind Over Ship, and the subsidiary afterlife of Counting Heads, I have been all too forgetful of my other child, the collection of stories Getting To Know You, which comes out from del Rey on December 30. Others have not, including the preeminent SF writer, reviewer, and encyclopedia editor, John Clute. He published a review of GTKY in yesterday's Sci-Fi Weekly that blows me away. He actually makes me sound like someone who knows what he's doing (when the fact is I have to read reviews to discover that). Anyway, it's humbling. Check it out.

Counting Heads in Romania

I am excited to see this come out, the Romanian edition of my first novel. I can't speak a word of Romanian, but I'm confident that this is a good translation because the translators, Cristina and Stefan Guidoveanu, sent me lists of questions to clarify terms and ideas. I usually inform foreign publishers that I'm available for such inquiries, but the Guidoveanus are the first to take me up on it.

Second Starred Review for MOS

The current issue of Publisher's Weekly has a starred review for Mind Over Ship. (If you go there to read it, scroll halfway down the page to the SF/Fantasy/Horror section.) Since my first published stories, I have tried to take the moderating attitude of not getting too excited over good reviews or too bummed over bad ones. This review is very good, but what pleases me most in it is the mention of my--ahem--moments of "perfect prose." Hell yes! I labor long polishing those sentences and paragraphs. It's probably the most fun part of the process for me.

The review also makes this observation: "While newcomers might wish for a short prologue or a glossary, those omissions don't significantly detract." It's a relief to hear this from a reviewer, but I'm still anxious to provide some kind of synopsis of Counting Heads here and elsewhere (see the previous posting to this blog). So, if you've read CH and would like to take a stab at writing a summary, please do so. Email it to me. Don't make me write one myself, please, because my head is so full of early drafts, revisions, deleted scenes, alternate scenes, and abandoned threads and characters, that I have a hard time remembering how the final book came out. No joke.