realthog

I discovered over the weekend that my novella The City in These Pages has made it to the British Fantasy Award longlist. There are 18 others on the longlist in this category so I'm not getting too excited at the moment; I am, nevertheless, extremely chuffed . . . and Pam's eyes are getting further exercise in rolling.

Numerous pals have likewise made it to the award's longlists; for fear of offending by omission (or could this be just stark laziness on my part?) I'll not recite all the names, although I should definitely mention that D.F. Lewis's Nemonymous 8: Cone Zero, which contains my story "Always More Than You Know", is there in the anthology section -- yay! -- while a couple of its stories are likewise recognized, including

neilhudson's excellent "The Point of Oswald Masters". (The other, by Kek-W, is every bit as excellent, but I don't think he's on LJ.)

Elsewhere in life, I (yet again!) read extremely late last night (must get round to doing another bukes roundup) so, so far this morning, everything's a bit . . . tentative. Perhaps a vigorous twenty minutes on the elliptical will clear away the cobwebs, and I will have side two of Bread Love & Dreams's The Strange Tale of Captain Shannon and the Hunchback from Ghiza to keep me company as I gasp and sweat (side one was yesterday's treat). Ever since I concluded, in perhaps mid-February or so, that I'd recovered sufficiently from the scissors-and-paste work of the fall to start getting serious about exercise, I've been rampaging through stacks of records/CDs in my collection that ordinarily I don't play often enough, plus some old favourites. I was thinking of perhaps a rafter-raising Cherubini Week sometime soon, because I've been discovering lately that he did more, much more than the D-minor Missa Solemnis and Requiem #2. A bit of Yer Klassical might raise the ton in the exercise room . . .