Views from Medina Road

• This isn't giving anything away, but for a couple years now Locus has offered its interview subjects links to special subscription pages on the Locus website whereby readers of their websites can either order the Locus issue with that person's interview postpaid, or subscribe for a year and receive said issue for free. You'll have noticed this if you've visited the websites of those who've been interviewed lately, or if you've been interviewed yourself. (A few interviewees, by the way, decline the offer of the link, uncomfortable with the matter for one reason or another, but the majority agree.) What brings this to attention now is that just yesterday Neil Gaiman's Journal posted an announcement of his own offer, subsequent to his interview in the February issue, and the response has far and away exceeded any other such offer -- some 30 responses just today, in the first 24 hours. (I create and post the special subscription pages and monitor the traffic from the website.) The point being, Neil evidently has a wide audience that extends far beyond the little globular cluster that is Locus, a spiral arm perhaps -- as I type another Neil sub email popped in -- and the beam he's shown in our direction is drawing them our way. Welcome to the party, we hope you'll stay.

• My email problems are more or less fixed, as I explained in a comment to the previous post, though not entirely. I'm beginning to suspect a weak or flaky wireless router is part of the problem. Still, I will try not to whine too frequently about my computer problems; not thinking myself special for any reason, I must suppose that most people have similar problems from time to time, and find better things to write about in their blogs than those problems. I will try too.

• 150 Locus Poll ballots received to date, and nearly 120 Best-fantasy-story poll submissions. I've run a tally on the former and seen some preliminary results. As always, it will be interesting to see how the early tallies compare to the final results. (Last year only a few of the early leaders eventually won.) I said last year I would run some queries on the ballots to reveal various voting patterns -- e.g., what percentage vote for novels only, or short fiction at all, etc. -- and never got around to it. I'll do so this year.