Lots going on!

First, an announcement:

https://aai.ku.edu/aai-announces-ad-astra-center-science-fiction-and-speculative-imagination

Basically, KU’s AAI is starting a new research center, The Ad Astra Center for Science Fiction and the Speculative Imagination, which will be directed by the indefatiguable Chris McKitterick. Website (when it finally goes live) will be here:

https://aai.ku.edu/centers/ad-astra

The J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center will continue as a departmental research center in the English Department, but I am not sure what that will look like. They do have money, so I foresee activities continuing. Ad Astra will be focusing on outreach and making public-facing connections. I am really happy and exctied for Chris, and also for KU. which now has two research centers that see SF as a literature central to our time. Am I involved with Ad Astra? Not…yet…. 🙂

I just finished a shortish story with the working title “Seven Sphinxes and 100 Answers,” though there are only one, two or three sphinxes in the story, depending on how you define a sphinx. It needs a better title. I am showing it to my grad students next week, and then I’ll rewrite it and send it out before I leave for Iceland. This is almost the final story I need for a second short story collection.

I leave for Iceland in sixteen days, if everything goes as planned. I have two people staying at my house for the duration to keep an eye on things, and to keep the cat from throwing herself through a window in loneliness and despair.They stopped by yesterday, and she actually came out to visit them, so this bodes well. I’ll be meeting the divine Elizabeth and we will be staying at an artist’s residency a couple of hours out of Reykjavík. I will be working on a new short story, but mainly I will be revising The American Tour, to get a final(ish) version to Gavin and Small Beer Press in February!

Full of contentment and missions today….