Views from Medina Road

April and May, and later October, tend to be the busy book seasons -- when there are more than average new books released each month. For the first time since I can't remember when, I have such a backlog of new books to be posted that I've split the '1st week May' listings into two pages, the first posted Tuesday, the second this evening. And I have another dozen titles already seen to list for the 2nd week of May, one title by virtue of a review copy sent me, the others due to bookstore sightings, as usual.

Meanwhile, comments to the previous entry include a couple rather insulting posts from someone named Karl (no last name), who finds the website unprofessional and the homepage a mess, and who feels entitled as a subscriber to the magazine to a website of much a higher standard (without explaining what that means). In addition, the appearance of my name and the link to this blog is apparently beyond pale. I mention this because this is the harshest criticism of the website I've gotten in the 8 years I've been doing it, but as always, given the constraints on my time and budget, I'm willing to consider suggestions anyone has to offer for revisions of any kind. Karl has a point that the website isn't about me, it's about science fiction, just as Locus Magazine is, but the placement of names and links has, actually, been at the suggestion of professionals in the field as a way of clarifying the still frequent misapprehension that the website is produced by Charles Brown and his staff, when in fact it is not. Meanwhile, I'm still in a revisionist mode, updating html formatting, certain layout coloring, and the content of the various infrastructure pages (the 'about' pages, 'faq' pages, etc. -- these not yet posted), slowly but surely in between the regular posts, catching up on e-mail, and working my day job. It would be nice to have more time and budget for the website, but it's not likely to happen anytime soon.