Well, cool. My short story Giant has been nominated for the 2004 Speculative Literature Foundation Fountain Award. What a nice "first"! The Fountain Award is decided by a panel of judges, but if anyone else is in a voting mood, do check out the 2004 Preditors & Editors Readers' Poll. Anyone can vote for their favorite genre (sf/fantasy, horror, and romance) online/print magazines, stories, authors, editors, etc., etc. It's a kind of mini-Hugos that seems to be mostly aimed at the small press, which is a nice change. What's also cool is that when I clicked onto the poll, I found "Giant" already nominated in the Science Fiction & Fantasy short stories list. (And Patrick swears he isn't the one who did it! :) ) So now I get to feel doubly happy.

I spent 3 hours of yesterday working out a total restructuring of The Music of The Stars, adding a new and important plotline starting way back in Chapter One, and following it through to Chapter Fifteen (where I am now). It changes the book--changes what kind of book it is--and I think it's a huge improvement. To me, at least, it feels suddenly much more solid and very exciting. Crisis begone! This morning, feeling confident about the novel after the scary month of wavering, I wrote another section-and-a-half of Chapter Fifteen and felt good about it.

It looks like I'll be teaching a full course of my own at the university this term, which is good financial news for all of us. (If it works out--which hasn't been quite decided yet--then my pay at the end of May should be about four times as much as I'd been expecting!) So it's time to start thinking about all those 19th-century philosophical texts I might have to teach... Schopenhauer, here we come! I have read all of them before, honest, when I assisted with the course two years ago. But that was two years ago, the class was early in the morning...excuses, excuses, excuses. When it comes right down to it, I've just forgotten it all. (It's all about Music, the Sublime, and...something. Right?) So the material should at least feel fresh to me as well as the students!