Some various notes to wrap up the (busy!) month of May

May is a wrap and thank goodness for that. It had to be one of my busiest months in recent memory. Here are some notes wrapping up various things from May. I’m clustering them together in one post rather than writing separately about each.

1. I turned in my first book review column for InterGalactic Medicine Show yesterday. I reviewed two books for the June column, Million Writer Awards anthology, edited by Jason Sanford; and 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. You can find out what I thought about each of those books when the column appears. I think it will get posted sometime soon. Of course, I’ll let you know when it’s posted.
2. Speaking of InterGalactic Medicine Show, issue 28 was released yesterday with a lead story by Brad Torgersen (who I interviewed for SF Signal earlier in May). Also a pretty amazing cover by Nick Greenwood.
3. May turned out to be the busiest month on the blog as well. I recorded over 66,000 visits in the month of May. That’s two-thirds of what I had in all of 2011. The weekly Going Paperless posts seem to be popular and well-received and that makes me happy.
4. I got the June issue of Locus in my email inbox this morning and discovered my picture in the magazine for the first time ever. It was the group photo of all of the Nebula Award winners and accepters, and as I accepted an award for Ken Liu, I was in the group photo. I’m standing between Joe Haldeman and Mike Fincke, which is very cool. Even if I never did anything else in science fiction, I can claim that I appeared in Locus.
5. There isn’t much time to exercise in my schedule, but I try to walk as much as possible. I talk a walk every morning at 10am. I walk to pick the Little Man up from school. I walk to the grocery store. In May, I walked some 284,000 steps, or nearly 150 miles. That will have to do for now, I suppose.
6. I haven’t been doing much fiction writing lately. I have one story out at the moment, and I’m hopeful, but we’ll see. I have 3 stories in various stages, but very little time to work on them. I was stirred to action after the Nebula Weekend, but just haven’t found the time. Maybe in June?
7. My Vacation in the Golden Age posts suffered in May because I didn’t have much time to read those magazines. I expect things to return to normal in June, with Episode 39, covering the September 1942 Astounding coming out on June 11
8. I did find time to tweak the template for this blog and so far, I’m happy with the results, although I’m not 100% finished with my tweaking.

So, May is over, June is here, and I’m hoping June will be somewhat less busy than May. I can use the break.