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What can I say?  There are a lot of terrific books coming out right now.  Written by people I’ve known for a long time.

I’ve known Leah Bobet and Brad Beaulieu since my days hanging around at the Online Writing Workshop.  Leah had arrived long before me, and so was already a sage presence on the mailing list when I stumbled along; Brad had been there longer than I, too, but not quite as much.  He and I traded a few critiques back in the day.

Anyway.  Excuse me while I wax sentimental.  Flash forward a few years, and wow!  Leah’s debut novel has just hit shelves in the US (it debuted earlier in Canada), and Brad’s brand-new second novel is out today.  He’s running a contest to celebrate and there’s still time (just barely) to win some major prizes.

It seems this is the weekend for Milkweed publishing news.  I was planning to sit on this for a few more days, but on further reflection, today seemed like the right day for another announcement. 

ARCs of The Coldest War have been sent out, and the audio edition is available, and the print and electronic editions will be appearing very soon.  That means the time has come for my publishers and I to put our collective heads together and turn our thoughts to the best format for Necessary Evil, the finale of the Milkweed Triptych.  We had to weigh a number of factors.  Most of all, however, we had to look for the best fit between the format and the story.

But once we considered all of our options, the answer became obvious!  Which is why Necessariy Evil will be published exclusively as a coloring book. 

We’re very excited about this.  It’s a perfect fit!  There’s even talk of an expanded edition that might come packaged with extra scenes as well as a box of crayons.  The details aren’t set in stone yet, but I’m confident that the coloring book format is the perfect approach for the final Milkweed novel.

Elizabeth Bear’s newest novel, Range of Ghosts, debuted yesterday.  It is awesome.

How do I know that?   Well, first of all, I had the distinct pleasure of a sneak peek at this novel at Leprecon almost a year ago, where Bear read an excerpt.  It knocked my socks off.  (Also, I have an ARC.  But I’m not going to brag about that (much).)  But don’t take my word for it.  Here’s what Brit Mandelo has to say about it, and SF Signal gave it a glowing 5 stars.

If you’re still not convinced that it’s worth a look, you can read an excerpt here.

Wow.  I let another 2 weeks pass without updating the blog.  Gosh, you’d never know I have books coming out this year given the AWESOME job I’m doing with the self-promotion.  I am setting the internet on fire with my mind-blowing promotion skills…

Luckily for me, I have extremely kind and diligent readers willing to take up the slack on my behalf!  (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s better to be lucky than good.)   Which leads to the coolest interview I’ve done online, at the French website Unwalkers.com.

A few weeks ago, I posted about current (heh) research into tDCS, transcranial direct current stimulation.  Soon after that, while at Boskone, I had a nice chat with my friends Tom and Linda Porter  (Hi Tom, Hi Linda!)  We got to talking about tDCS, which, not surprisingly, is a topic I find rather interesting.  They had seen a writeup in the Washington Post, a version of the New Scientist article I’d linked to.

Tom and Linda were kind enough to provide me with the newspaper clipping (“Trying a 9-volt shortcut to expertise”, pg E4, Tuesday, February 14, 2012).  And am I grateful for their generosity—while reading the newspaper article I ran across a fantastic detail that I’d completely missed in the New Scientist article.