A preliminary draft of William Shunn's memoir The Accidental Terrorist can be heard in serialized form in his free podcast. Listen now, while all episodes are still available!

A revised draft of William Shunn's memoir The Accidental Terrorist: My Adventures as a Foot Soldier in the Mormon Army is at last complete and delivered to his agent for submission. The book chronicles his months as an LDS missionary in Canada, which culminated with his arrest, conviction, and deportation for an unfortunate incident involving a commercial passenger jet. An earlier draft of The Accidental Terrorist was serialized in Shunn's podcast, the relevant episodes of which are still available for downloading.

Bill and his intrepid wife Laura Chavoen will be attending the 66th World Science Fiction Convention this summer in Denver, Colorado.

Our celebrity sightings have definitely tailed off since we moved to Chicago, but Laura and one of her colleagues had a good one the other day. At the same hot dog joint where they were grabbing lunch, they spotted Dennis DeYoung of Styx.

(I'd suggest that he had too much time on his hands, but Tommy Shaw took the lead vocal on that track.)

On our upcoming Egyptian vacation, we take an overnight train to Aswan. We splurged on a sleeper car, because how cool is it to ride a sleeper car in North Africa? And we plan to join the Eight Feet High Club.

There's no way on earth that I'm the world's biggest Steely Dan fan, but I like to think I'm up there in the top thousand. This may explain why I'm so stoked that, after 2006's Morph the Cat from Donald Fagen, we're about to get Circus Money from Walter Becker!

Check out the first single, "Somebody's Saturday Night", streamed from Rolling Stone:

We'll be seeing Becker and Fagen together this July at the Chicago Theater....