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A couple excerpts below from various introductory or outro materials recently written or published.

(sample cover by Templesmith–now, that’s a Mord!)

by and Christopher Mitten (covers by Templesmith), out in July.

From the intro: “Sometimes Big Ideas come out of deceptively small beginnings. In the first issue of Wasteland, a wanderer named Michael comes out of the desert into a small settlement. It’s a century after the Big Wet has des

UPDATE: , which reads in part, “The author’s compassion for his fellow humans comes through in every story, from the wrenching study of a mad rock star’s long-suffering girlfriend in ‘The Opium General� to a gentle vignette of sword and sorcery hero Elric in ‘A Portrait in Ivory�. A long-overdue retrospective.�

The cover, and interior detail, from Tachyon’s The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey with assistance from Ann and me. As I discuss in the afterword, it�

We’ve got some extra copies of Best American Fantasy 2008. If you’re a blogger or reviewer interested in reading and covering this title, send me an email at vanderworld at hotmail.com and I’ll see what I can do to hook you up. Please include your address and the media outlet/blog you represent in your initial query to save some time.

Meanwhile, SF Site has in which the rapidly disintegrating (propagandist) Paul Kincaid chokes on the word “American� and makes a pretty crappy swea

Just a note that I have some Secret Lives left for sale. . (All orders received have gone out, btw.) If I sell three more, I can justify ordering the Manny Pacquiao-Ricky Hatton pay-per-view fight this weekend, and I know that would make Charles Tan very, very happy. Er, and I’ll contribute ten percent of what comes in to the Nature Conservancy so I satisfy my selfish and my better halves�

Can this guy stop the Pac-Man? C’mon, underneath the indifference, you know

The cover, and interior detail, from Tachyon’s The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey with assistance from Ann and me. As I discuss in the afterword, it’s nearly impossible to do a 150,000-word best-of for Mike’s short fiction, but we were helped out by Del Rey’s Elric series. It seemed ridiculous to reproduce much Elric material, given that series. So think of this as the best of Moorcock mostly minus Elric–but including a lot of his best mainstream and non-series material–that make

, the Punch Out Five (aka , , , , and ) will be stagin� Star Wars scenes for mah amusement in the nearish future. Should be interesting.

Although not mentioned in the Omnivoracious piece, one of these unlucky, hapless fools also received a set of policeman outfit stickers, complete with handcuffs, to include in the scenarios–as pictured here�

Check-out girl: Whatcha gonna do? Tape some grapes to those protein bars?

Me: Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And then you know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to paaaartay like there’s no tomorrow!

I just got a lovely print-out of an unbound advance copy of Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel, and . It’s really quite cool stuff, and very reasonably priced. Kinda retro-Steampunk. Good fun.

Here are some interiors I didn’t use in the Amazon piece.

You might remember a little novel I , already .

It :

:

Ann read it in full regalia, with guardians:

Ann then created a spiral bound copy that was easier to work with, and I incorporated her edits and made my own further edits. The new format helped me to look at the text with fresh eyes.

After that stage, I sent it to my agent Howard Morhaim and my editor Victoria Blak

(Yes, E6 is ridiculous�)

Last week we went to see Living Things and Electric Six at The Engine Room here in Tallahassee, and then Dengue Fever at the Club Downunder, in the student union.

Living Things had a New York Dolls vibe going on in their look, and a hard rock-and-roll sheen to their music (but not sans melody). I like their CDs a lot, but figured they’d be better live, and they were. They had real attitude, and managed to pull it off. The drummer was insane (as perhaps indicated by the ph