Ending the radio silence with some burst broadcasts:

It's been nearly a month: no Bull Spec #7; no December newsletter; hardly anybody has gotten their Kickstarter gear in hand yet; etc. So, some bursts into the static:

• Yup, issue #7 is late. Still at least a week before it will be in a printable state. Very sorry to everyone concerned, not the least of which Candlemark & Gleam and Pyr, whose advertisements help make the issue possible, and whom I told it would be out mid last month. Still, some good news: Bull Spec has a real, legitimate designer now: Gabriel Dunston. His layouts are crisp and much more inventive than mine, though retaining the overall 2-column design and readability. The cover is coming along in most excellent fashion, with Angi Shearstone's illustration of D. K. Thompson's story, with Jeremy Zerfoss coming in to put the final cover design together. Thanks to new reviews editor Alex Ward, the reviews and interviews are being copy edited into shape. I'm quite proud of the stories in what is my next-to-last issue as fiction editor.
• The December newsletter is coming soon. There's a new event just around the corner, Hillary Jordan reads & signs her new novel When She Woke at Chapel Hill's Flyleaf Books on Monday, December 5th at 7 pm. Also, there'll be a full list of the local and regional author books I know about coming in 2012. A few January events are still to be finalized, but I'll give you what info I have.
• I did get all the Kickstarter "surveys" out and have been gathering them in, ordering books as needed, and I think now that we have a final pendant count we will get those underway. T-shirts to be ordered ASAP now that pretty much everybody has gotten back to me on size and style.
• Natania Barron's Pilgrim of the Sky is *in stock* at both Amazon.com and BN.com -- that probably means that you can order it from pretty much any bookstore you'd like to, though it's not in the IndieBound website catalog so it might be more of a special order.
• On the front of "getting some things done, cutting some things for later" I was going to finally put together a post covering the several writing (and reading) groups I know about, but I think that will wait for January.
• A couple of really nice Bull Spec news bits: SF Site reviews issue #6 very favorably and SF Signal's year-end mind meld mentions M. David Blake's "Absinthe Fish" as a story "which perfectly fulfills my criteria for "mind-blowing fiction."
• When I get around to it, I'll be closing Bull Spec to fiction submissions for the rest of the year.

Whew. OK. Onward and forward, etc.