First sentence from the first post of each month this year:
January: In the year 2005 I resolve to: Stop exercising.
February: Leonard Nimoy sings a song about Bilbo Baggins.
March: Children’s author Arthur Ransome was under surveillance by MI5.
April: More rubbish from John Laughland in the Guardian today.
May: Best Novel: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold – Hooray! Good for her.
June: Running from the conference to the Metro on Monday evening, I answered a voicemail from a journalist asking my views on the French referendum; I checked his paper on-line yesterday and didn’t see his article, but good old Google News Alerts has now flagged it up for me.
July: Every so often, it happens; I have to go through the CV’s of various exceptionally motivated and intelligent young people, and then decide which of them gets the privilege of working with me.
August: Neil Gaiman provides sensible commentary.
September: Got up at 0630 to drive to Skopje.
October: A collection of sf stories by French (and one Belgian) writer, collected in the mid-1970s; very much feeling like New Wave, plus an added appreciation of sex which somehow feels different from the way an American or British writer of the time would have tackled the subject.
November: It is dark.
December: Six months ago, I knew David Marusek only as the author of the haunting story, “The Wedding Album”, winner of the Sturgeon Award in 2000, collected in that year’s Dozois collection and also in Dozois’ Best of the Best collection.
That Daily Mail story is nauseating – not surprising, but definitely vomitous.