Finally! Been a long time waiting for this to arrive, after assorted delays and mishaps. And it arrives within a few days of my hearing that Alexandra Pierce at Locus made particular mention of my piece herein (among a few others), and described it as “a powerful story on many levels”; not gonna quibble with that, no sir.

Also happening this week, and I believe for some weeks to come, some chunks of my writing—semi-theoretical musings in this case, rather than fiction or sustained essays—are appearing online thanks to good friends and fellow travellers FoAM having decided to get double use out of some work they commissioned from me earlier in the year, a mosaic of material under the umbrella title Hip-Deep in the Thick Present. You can read “May The Road Rise With You” and “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” right now at the FoAM blog, and then you can sub to their RSS feed in order to receive more design/art/futures-oriented nuggets from me and many others as the weeks go by. How can you resist?

Meanwhile I’ve spent the majority of the last week stuck indoors due to a combination of inclement weather and a medium-grade but frustratingly persistent cold: just foggy-headed enough to be unable to do any substantial brainwork, but not sick enough that I could allow myself to just camp out under the duvet and sulk (though it was very tempting).

Furthermore, various family-adjacent issues mean that the coming holidays are unlikely to have much of a holiday vibe… but that’s just how the world turns, and what can we do but dance along beside it? The work takes many forms, but it never takes a break. Selah.