I attended several panels on Saturday at WFC in San Jose, including the standard "best books of the year" panel at which, in previous years, Charles Brown has distributed an early draft version of the Locus Recommended Reading List (limited to fantasy titles) as a basis for discussion. This year's panel included Liza Groen Trombi as the Locus representative and was moderated by Annalee Newitz,

Just a quick note for the moment -- home tonight from World Fantasy Con, following a visit Sunday night with friends near Santa Cruz, and a drive home today via the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I'll do one more post summarizing some interesting panels at the con (though note the io9 'blink' posted this evening, about the notable books of the year panel) and some of the interesting parties at the con...

This year's World Fantasy Convention is in San Jose, California, the heart of the 'Silicon Valley' at the south end of the bay below San Francisco to the northwest and Oakland (Locus HQ) to the northeast. It's in the same hotel, the Fairmont San Jose, that served as the main hotel for the 2002 World SF Convention, an event I remember fondly since that is where I won a Hugo Award...I drove here

Which is to say, the final piece of the 2009 Locus Online redesign project is complete: the application of the new site layout template to the News Blog, which was first set up back in January before the redesign of the rest of the site commenced. I have in mind some summary lists via include files in the right pane, but I didn't want to hold up the template update for those. Such lists will be

Very quick note: In posting breaking news 'blinks' about the deaths of Don Punchantz and Dean Ellis (since Locus HQ probably won't post official obits until Monday), I couldn't help but seek out images of what to me are iconic covers for certain SF classics -- which is to say, theirs were the covers on the editions of those books I first acquired myself, in the late 1960s, and however many

I've been meaning for several weeks now to catch up on commenting about books I've read recently, but have not gotten around to organizing my notes and preparing proper summaries. I still haven't gotten around to that, so never mind; let me spend an hour or so posting relatively off-hand reactions to the last 10 titles that I've read -- cover images and links already updated in the column to the

We saw Julie and Julia a couple weeks ago and so of course I had to come home and order a copy of her cookbook from Amazon.com, and then, pace Slate, we set about making the film's signature dish, boeuf bourguignon. This is basically chunks of beef browned and then simmered in red wine, served with mushrooms and onions and boiled potatoes, but the recipe has all sorts of little details: you

Apologies for any lack of e-mail response this evening: Outlook has been unable to send or receive all evening, and the best the folks at CI Host can suggest is to reboot my computer. We'll see.

One of the features of living in southern California is the periodic spectacle of wildfires that darken our skies with smoke and threaten our towns and neighborhoods with conflagration. The latest, which started last week in the Angeles National Forest in the mountains to the northeast of LA, has made national news for its size and continued growth more than for its destruction, a couple dozen

One topic I talked about with Charles Brown the last time I spoke with him (that May weekend trip to the Bay Area I blogged about earlier, and which CNB wrote about in his June issue editorial), was the idea of doing another, or perhaps several, polls of all-time best novels. A reader had written him suggesting an update, since the last all-time novels poll was done by Locus way back in 1998 (my

My partner and I participated in helping to boost the US economy (or at least the fortunes of car dealers) this past month, by taking part in the 'Cash for Clunkers' program that made sufficiently inefficient gas guzzlers eligible for a $3500 - $4500 trade-in value toward a new vehicle with sufficiently better gas mileage. Yeong was in China last month when the program became big news for having

As promised in the previous post, the Roundtable Blog has now been recast to a format matching the rest of the site. A detail or two still needs adjusting, e.g. the Contributors list is offset a bit, because Blogger wants to format it as an unordered list, and I've managed to remove the automatic bullets but not yet the automatic indentation. So many little details...I'm glad to see more activity

I have, off and on, for several days now, been working to complete the final phase of the Locus Online Redesign Project, which means specifically to convert the two initial site blogs, News and Roundtable, to the format of the site homepage and the other blogs (such as Reviews), with the same page width, the same menu bar across the top, and a similar right sidebar.Converting those two initial

No, I am not at this year's Worldcon in Montreal, I am sorry to report; I'm missing Worldcon for only the second time in 20 years (the other time being two years ago in Japan); the economy has affected Locus Online's discretionary budget for convention trips, leaving only the upcoming World Fantasy Con as a potential con attendance for this year. (Needless to say, there is no corporate (Locus)

Over the weekend I attended the Charles N. Brown memorial, which was held in San Francisco at Borderlands Books, Sunday beginning at noon. That event was preceded by a smaller 'memorial bar-b-q' at Brown's house in Oakland on Saturday evening, for the extended staff and a few guests who had flown in from out of town. I drove up from L.A. with Yeong on Saturday, arriving at the house just as the

I'm old enough to remember -- I was 13, in the summer between 8th and 9th grades. Star Trek had ended a couple months earlier, I had survived two weeks in the hospital following a ruptured appendix a couple months before that ("In the Year 2525" ran endlessly on the radio that played in my shared room), a year or so before that, 2001: A Space Odyssey had premiered, and only a year or two before

It was a shock -- though not completely unexpected. If anything, Charles' health seemed worse a couple years ago, while recently, despite occasional hospital visits and the recurring downtimes during conventions, his general cheerfulness gave the impression that those mere physical limitations were incidental, that his spirit drove him on. I envied him the energy and determination to continue to

I am not headed to the Locus Awards in Seattle, where all the cool people will be this weekend; various circumstances alluded to in previous posts will be making this an extremely frugal year for travel and convention attendance, for me. Instead I will stay home and stoke the fires of keeping the website running, with an imminent update to the awards index and a few outstanding finishing touches

After our sojourn in Napa Valley last weekend, Yeong went to work in Hayward on Monday and I drove up to visit the gleaming Locus HQ office tower on Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland, where I --Well, no. The Secret of Ridgewood Lane is that there is no Locus office tower, gleaming or otherwise; Locus Magazine is run out of the home of its publisher Charles N. Brown. And it's not really a secret;

Sunday we drove through Napa Valley, past dozens of wineries and through hundreds of vineyards, with stops at Mondavi and Grgich Hills and Stag's Leap and Sterling Vineyards, with its Greek villa architecture atop a hill accessed by a ski-lift style tram. Along the way we stopped for lunch.The CIA is the Culinary Institute of America, apparently based in New York but with a facility in Napa