So Laura and I spent last weekend in Chicago. Saturday was a long, long day of looking at apartments, some of which were very tempting and which we had to reluctantly conclude were not right for us. The most tempting of them all was a giant four-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a graystone on a large lot-and-a-half. It was a steal for the price, but still about $300 over our budget.

After dinner with the in-laws who had generously and heroically driven us around the city all day, Laura and I headed north to arrive in time for dessert with at Ysabeau Wilce's fabulous and humongoid apartment, where we also crossed paths with Paul Witcover of theinferior4 fame. No dueling blogs ensued, but Guitar Hero II was played. We shout, shout, shout at the devil!

We were nervous about our prospects upon restarting the hunt Sunday morning. If we didn't find something that day, Laura would have to make a solo hunting trip back alone. Fortunately, the second place we saw Sunday morning was perfect. First floor of a greystone in Humboldt Park, good neighbors in the building, El stops convenient, nice communal yard for the dog, friendly landlord, only $100 over our budget, and best of all two blocks away from TASTEE FREEZ! Oh, dear. I have shed 17 pounds in the past two months through brute willpower, but now I fear their return is incipient.

But we have a place to live! Now the only thing to worry about is the moving itself.

---

Welcomed Brook and Julia West to New York City this morning, and despite a kerfluffle which involved their cab speeding away with their walking sticks still in the trunk, followed by a hey-it-coulda-been-far-less-helpful call to 311, I think they got settled in well. Brook and Julia are in town to receive the Service to SFWA Award at this week's Nebula Awards Weekend, and Derryl Murphy spearheaded the effort to get them here from Salt Lake City to accept in person. I knew Brook and Julia when I lived in Utah, and hadn't seen them in 12 years or so. Such great people. I hope they have a great visit here.

---

So, the Nebula Awards Weekend kicks off tomorrow, and I am trying just to relax, go with the flow, and have fun. The internets are a great help to me in not getting too invested in the outcome. I never know from one day to the next if I am supposed to feel worse about being a white male American writer, a logrolling vote trader, or a representative of the entrenched regressive old-school badly written skiffy boy-story movement. Am I supposed to be more embarrassed about the Nebula nomination or the Hugo nomination? Is it a double blessing, a double curse, or do the two just cancel each other out? Inquiring minds need to know.

I wish we could all just be writers, writing the best stories we know how, and none of the rest was important.

Epidode #45 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill reads the third and concluding part of his Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated novella "Inclination." Plus, special violence, sex, profanity and music episode!

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=45

See also shunncast.

Raise your hand if you're planning to attend Nebula Awards Weekend in New York next month.

Epidode #44 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill reads the second of three parts of his Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated novella "Inclination."

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=44

See also shunncast.

The complete text of "Inclination" is now available in three downloadable audio files, read by the author, at:

http://www.shunn.net/inclination/

Epidode #43 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill reads the first of three parts of his Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated novella "Inclination."

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=43

See also shunncast.

Andrew Leonard has a wonderful remembrance of playing chess with Kurt Vonnegut in his Salon blog:

On a whim, he suggested that we rearrange the board. Why did the pawns have to go in front, those sacrificial lambs about to be chewed up by the slaughterhouse of the front lines, those powerless vassals of the high and mighty? Let's force the feudal lords out of their foxholes and into the hurly-burly!

Let's put the pawns in the back row, he proposed. Let's put the knights and bishops and kings and queens in the front rank!  [full posting]

I could have done without the gratuitous Ann Coulter reference, but it is Salon.

And sadly, the first thing I learned clicking over to the "Print" section of Sci Fi Wire was that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Whether you think he was a science fiction writer or not, he was one of the greats and will be missed.

So it goes.

Today over at Sci Fi Wire, the news service of the Sci Fi Channel, I am interviewed by John Joseph Adams (a/k/a slushgod) about my Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated novella "Inclination."

Lots of other nominees have been interviewed over the past couple of weeks in the "Print" section of Sci Fi Wire. Read 'em all!

What a long, long day! Laura went to Long Island to partake of Easter dinner with friends and their families, whilst I wrote pretty much from 5:00 am to 10:30 pm—with breaks, of course, for food, playing with the dog, a nap, coffee-brewing, and general screwing around.

Anyway, I took a break from novel-writing today to write a 2,500-word short story entitled "Care and Feeding of Your Piano." Or maybe Perry Slaughter wrote it, I haven't quite decided yet. It's a narrative cast entirely in excerpts from a fictional future product manual. Light, offbeat, and nasty in a way Perry could certainly claim responsibility for with pride.

I never mix writing and alcohol, but now that the story is done I'm enjoying a celebratory Talisker and some nicely atmospheric music. The Talisker bottle has at most two pours left, which means I'm about half a week away from clearing one more of the low bottles from the liquor cabinet in preparation for the big move. Woo-hoo!

Anyway, this story's title is one that's been hanging around in my files without a story attached for maybe a decade. In fact, it's been a title without a story for so long that it feels a little surreal now to be on the far side of the divide. That's all right, I guess. There's plenty more titles and ideas where that one came from.

And now back to my regularly scheduled novel, already in progress.