It’s been a month since I returned from Ottawa, and still no blog post about it. Just what the hell is my problem, anyway?

Mostly it has been camera issues, as I wanted to include some photographic evidence of the trip. Camera issues have been sorted out, laziness issues continue unabated…

Seriously though, various writing things have come up which made blogging seem like procrastination (given how much I like procrastination you’d think I’d have been all over the blogging instead of re-watching movies like Broken Arrow and Face Off.) So…what kind of “writing things” (that’s the technical term–I checked with my editor) have I been up to:

I finished a review of David Nickle’s excellent Rasputin’s Bastards for The Winnipeg Review. It was a great read, but it was also a big Russian bear to review.

Copy edits and page proofs for Thunder Road. I’m not sure how many of you reread the books you buy, but I’ve reread this book I’ve written more times than I can easily count. Page proofs are also the terror-stage of publishing. It’s the last chance I’ll get to change anything. Which of course means I want to change everything.

With only a month until the launch of the book, there’s been a lot of unexpected (okay, expected, but completely ignored) things to take care of. I spent a good week tracking down the mailing address of what seems like pretty much everyone in Winnipeg. I promised the store I’d blow the roof off the place (the metaphorical roof, not the literal roof–that would get me fired and arrested). This seems more likely to happen, as within a week of the date being set, we had enough reservations that the event grew too large for its initial venue. So, thank you, Winnipeg. That was an amazing feeling.

I’ve finally posted the cover for Thunder Road. If you missed it on Facebook and Twitter, here it is again, because I can’t stop looking at the thing:

Trilogy, you say? I’m hard (ha!) at work on Tombstone Blues. And somewhere in this sea of first book publicity I still need to finish that damned sequel. It’s coming along. More slowly than I’d like, but hopefully I won’t be embarrassed of the book when I turn it in to Turnstone Press in November.

I’ve added a second reading at When Words Collide. I’m part of EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy’s fall launch. I’ll be reading the first five minutes or so of my Tesseracts 16 short story “Back in Black.”

In other short story news, I’ve finished my galley edits for “First They Came for the Pigs” which was a surprisingly painless procedure. Pre-sale on the Fungi anthology happens in November, release is set for December.

I also finished a short story: “A Taste of the Other Side” (almost finished, actually, still some tiny amounts of polish to be lacquered on to it) and will be submitting it to the editor this week. This one was for an anthology where I’d been invited to submit a story. That was a big deal for me, it also means added pressure to get it right out of the gate. I think it works. We’ll see.

The last “writer thing” I’ve had to do involved writing a one hundred word bio of myself. It seems every time I need a bio, a slightly different word count is asked for, and so I must toil at trying to make myself seem a) interesting and b) not a total douche. Thanks to The Daly Show, a little less douche has become my biographical mantra.

Write on!