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Well, that was a fun day. I sent off the third Cross book to my agent, which felt nice. I also got a nerd high off getting mentioned on the Reading Rainbow Twitter feed (a RT, but still!). That happened at the same time I was downloading the Reading Rainbow iPad app. You’ve got to love the universe sometimes. Unless you’re a spider. Spiders clearly hate everything.

A few years back, Stephen King put out a book called Joyland. As it turns out, another writer I know, Emily Schultz, also had a novel called Joyland. When King published his book, people started buying her book, thinking it was the same one. Hilarity ensued in Amazon reviews. Now Emily has created a blog chronicling how she’s spending the Stephen King money. I talked to her about the whole bizarre experience over at The Province.

Then horror writer Stephen King published a novel called Joyland, and Schultz’s life went a little crazy. Readers started buying her Joyland novel, thinking it was King’s new book. Joyland’s publisher, ECW, contacted Schultz to let her know her book had suddenly sold 200 copies. “It was exciting for about 60 seconds,” Schultz says, “then I realized, uh-oh, there will probably be some angry readers out there! Sure enough, the one-star reviews started piling up on Amazon.”

So I wrote a quick overview of the Hugo Awards controversy this year for The Province. It’s really the sort of crazy situation that would need a novel to adequately cover, but who has time for novels these days?

The catalyst for the conflict was the announcement of the Hugo shortlists, which included a couple of expected nominees — Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood for best novel — but also a number of highly controversial and perhaps unexpected selections (or perhaps not, depending on who you talk to). Larry Correia made the best novel list for his book Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles, as did Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson for the entire Wheel of Time fantasy series. That’s right, an entire series stretching back many years is nominated for best novel of the year. It’s one of those technicality things. To top things off, controversial writer Vox Day was nominated in the best novelette category, enraging many in the sci-fi community who have battled with him online.

I’ve been sick for, oh, a month or so now thanks to the latest bug my son brought home for preschool. I think I’m almost over it, though, which means it’s time for him to bring a new bug home.

At least I’ve managed to do some writing, in between surfing various blogs detailing the Hugo Awards brouhaha. It’s like a train wreck with new trains coming along and crashing into it every few minutes. I keep thinking I should write a newspaper piece about it but I don’t even know where to start.

Anyways. The writing. I’ve finished a new Azrael story, tentatively titled “The Angel Azrael Is Sacrificed to the Snake God.” I wrote it with an Azrael collection in mind, and I think I’ve got about 30,000 words of Azrael stories now, which is about half a book for me. (Most of my books start out around 60,000 words and then grow to 70,000 or 80,000 in the editing process.) So that’s something.

All right, now I’m going to curl up with some Neo-Citran and watch some more trains crash.