Haven’t been keeping with my short fiction reading lately (lots of novels), but here’s a bunch of stuff I enjoyed recently:

• Offerings by Stephanie Burgis (Fantasy Magazine)
  • That Wednesday, the witch found five silver paperclips laid across her doorstep, next to an apple and a sharpened No. 2 pencil. She regarded them gravely as the breeze from the lake swept up through the pine trees and ruffled her upswept black hair. Then she turned to see if she could spot any signs of who had left them.
• “Charms” by Shweta Narayan (Strange Horizons)
  • Edith nods, but what it’s not is fair. It’s too easy, the tide of war washing these feckless, smiling girls up, drowning Edith in the bile and brine of the past. And she’s hardly old, not yet. Not yet. She shakes her head tiredly. Women’s magic, she says, is like everything else. Not good enough for girls these days.
• “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
  • The women that moved within the ring of flames wore nothing but their shifts, silk and lace that freed long white limbs Zel could not help but admire. Three women among the flames, a fourth who held the knife: the old man’s ice maiden daughters.

Stuff I’ve enjoyed recently:

• Stephen Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen (at book 6 now, trying to justify the expense of buying book 8 )
• Girl Genius (a fun Hugo-nominated comic, featuring Mad Scientists, a kick-ass heroine, and armies of evil robots)
• Pride and Publishing: why editors are like suitors
• Slowly but steadily getting back into the short story swing: rewriting a collab story with weird aliens
• Ordering the (almost) complete Battlestar Galactica (missing the last season, but it was such a bargain we can buy the last season later)

Stuff I have not so much enjoyed recently:

• The leak in the kitchen ceiling, which has resulted in the pain peeling away, plus various water-related damage (and the bit where it doesn’t stop isn’t cool)
• General fatigue, spurred on by the workload
• Matlab, mex files and the %%% syntax rules for those, which don’t allow anything beyond ANSI C. Code compiles fine in Eclipse, but not in mex, which is ironic when they use the same compiler… (obligatory geek bit # 1)
• Fighting with php to put my latest blog post on my homepage. Ended up retrieving my own rss feed (obligatory geek bit #2)

Mostly happy stuff:

-Illustration of “Ys” (story in Interzone 222) here, in colour, courtesy of the awesome Mark Pexton

-Came home to my May 2009 Locus, to find, rather to my surprise, a review of “The Lonely Heart” by Rich Horton (in a focus on the Campbell Award Nominees, which had lots of good stuff to say about Felix Gilman’s “Catastrophe” in Weird Tales, Tony Pi’s “Silk and Shadow” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Gord Sellar’s “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands”:

Aliette de Bodard has caught my eye with some strong traditional fantasy tales and some fine work set in an alternate history ruled by the Aztecs”. “The Lonely Heart”, from Black Static for February/March is a different and darker tale (though de Bodard has always shown a great deal of range in both subject matter and tone)…

(the issue also had nice things to say about J. Kathleen Cheney’s “Early Winter, Near Jenli Village” in Fantasy Magazine, which you really should read if you haven’t)

-Also was pointed out to this by Scott H. Andrews: a list of writers in semiprozines to watch out for, in which, hum, I appear a bunch of times… (I second the recommendations for Shweta Narayan and Angela Slatter, BTW. They both write terrific fiction). 

In non-selfish self-promoting links, I’ve found a new webcomic to get addicted to: Freakangels by Warren Ellis and Paul Dufield. Set in a post-Apocalyptic, flooded London, this focuses around the Freakangels, a group of people cursed with strange powers. It soon becomes clear that it’s their combined powers that ended the world, and that they’re trying to make amends for it by making Whitechapel into a haven of peace for refugees in a world gone mad. Things would be going swimmingly well, were it not for the twelfth Freakangel–Mark, the one they expelled from their group, and who now plans to kill them one by one… It’s got great character interaction, vivid art and a plot that bites. Not sure where it’s going or how long it’s going to take to get there, but it’s a super nice ride.

(Iain Jackson had a column over at Strange Horizons about the best comics of the year, and I intend to check several others of those out, looks like a good list)