Almost three weeks into the month of July, and no blog entries? What’s going on? Guess I’ve been using Twitter to make little announcements and updates on what I’ve been working on and doing.

Speaking of Twitter, I added a little widget to the right-hand sidebar of my Web site here — Recent Tweets — so you non-tweeting people can see what you’re missing.  😉

And more than anything, I’ve just been keeping busy, with Lizzie and the boys and the usual summer stuff of cutting the grass, pulling weeds, going to the pool, chasing the kids, visiting the fam, hanging out with our nieces, and just trying to keep up with everything.

I’m also halfway through my pile of books for my upcoming Master Class in October, with six books to go. All this reading has been great — I feel like I’ve got my reading mojo back!

And I’m less than 100 pages away from my final major revision to my young-adult urban fantasy novel, A Sudden Outbreak of Magic. Only eight chapters left! For some reason, I got really stuck on chapter 12, and spun my wheels for a week or two on it. But now I’m back on it, and my current chapter has a group of teenagers flying around an outdoor basketball court in early winter, dunking the ball at will. Fun!

Maybe my spinning wheels on the novel was due to the Secret Project that presented itself. Now, I’ve always hated when people went on about their SPs on their blogs, so I’ll try not be annoying about it. Let’s just say that I’m very excited about it, that the project is the kind of thing I’ve wanted to do for years, and the person I’m collaborating with has got some great, creative skills. Oh, and this site is a teensy hint…

Finally, I wanted to share some cool news on the publishing front. While I’m still waiting for Black Gate 14 to appear with the story I wrote with Jay, I found out that my story “Goddamn Redneck Surfer Zombies” will be reprinted in the best-of zombie anthology, The Best of All Flesh:

This looks to be a great set of stories about those wonderful undead folks that people can’t seem to get enough of. Coming out in December of this year, it includes stories by Charles C. Finlay, Toby Buckell, Jim C. Hines, Scott Nicholson and more. Including my story of the undead coming to a beachfront town in North Carolina and taking over the surfing… Sweet.