Well, I hope you’ve all had a nice long holiday weekend - even if the weather was as rotten as it was here in Velcro City. I hardly noticed, though - I’ve been busy.

One of the many things I’ve been doing over the weekend is playing around behind the scenes at T3A Space, the new-look blog-style website for TTA Press (publisher of short genre fiction magazines Interzone, Crimewave and Black Static). T3A is where updates and story acceptances for the TTA stable are posted, and over the coming months it’s going to grow into a content-rich site with lots of good stuff to read.

Andy (TTA’s head honcho) already had things looking sexy with an eye-catching theme (luckily - as, having seen VCTB, no one in their right mind would set me loose on the aesthetics of a website), but yours truly has been hacking about with the ergonomics and functionality. Upgrades include a working spam-free comments system, and lots of other behind-the-curtain search-engine friendly stuff. There’s still work to be done, but things are looking good so far.

I’ve also set the RSS feed for the site to run through Feedburner, which is a very easy operation but well worth the time invested. But if you click through, you’ll see the subscription counter sat at a lowly first-day count of zilch, zero, nada.

So, here’s the challenge - I’d like you all to subscribe to the T3A RSS feed, which I’ve made extra easy by linking to it there. You don’t even have to click more than once! Let’s see if we can’t get that counter to show something a little more impressive than zero by tomorrow, eh?

I’m very pleased to announce that Gareth L. Powell has sold his first novel, Silversands, to Pendragon Press. It’s been quite a month for Gareth, as just a few weeks ago he announced the acceptance of his first short story collection. Congratulations, Gareth, and well deserved.

The title should say it all, and whatever else you need to know should become apparent after you read Geoff Ryman’s announcement on the TTA Press website.

But for those too flabbergasted (or lazy) to click through, Mr. Ryman (with the assistance of Julian Todd and Trent Walters) will be guest editing an issue of Interzone to be published next year, which will adhere strictly to the manifesto of the Mundane SF movement, of which Ryman is a founder. Some simple guidelines:

“What makes a story Mundane? A few simple rules:

• no FTL travel or communications
• no aliens
• no time travel
• no parallel universes
• no immortality or telepathy.”

There you have it. More guidelines, plus details about how to submit a story for consideration, can be found by clicking through to the TTA website. So get writing, already! I might even have a go at this myself. After all, what’s a little failure between friends?

Continue reading “Magazine Review: Talebones #34 (Winter 2006)”