Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Summer's End & New Resnick Review

Summer is over for all intents and purposes and even though the weather wouldn’t lead one to think that was the case (at least here in NJ), when your wife teaches, summer ends at Labor Day. All in all Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff and I had an awesome summer; we got some work done on our house: one bathroom completely renovated including new tile, tub/shower, sink, painting and fixtures and the bedroom which included painting the walls/ceiling and ripping up the rug to find hardwood floors in (thankfully) pretty good condition. To give the credit where it’s due, the Amazing Mrs. Blog o' Stuff did a lot of the work. It’s always cool to come home to find what surprise she has for me, be it a shrub cut down or a wall painted or new tiles in the bathroom. We also did some landscaping work removing a giant eyesore of a bush from the front lawn, had a new roof installed and added shutters to the front of the house. It wasn’t all hard work as we relaxed in our pool quite a bit both with friends and without. I finished up my summer bowling league with my brother-in-law this past week coming in third place, allowing us to win what we've come to call the “Prize of the Beast.” Like I said, the summer flew past us but it was a great one.

That said, Labor doesn’t deter me from my geekish responsibilities; I put up another review at SFFWorld yesterday, Stalking the Unicorn by Mike Resnick. Pyr has been reissuing and publishing a lot of Mike Resnick’s fiction since the imprint’s inception. This is good for people like me who have been relatively unexposed to Resnick’s copious and vast output of genre fiction. Stalking the Unicorn was originally published in 1987, long before the current crop of Urban Fantasy authors. The protagonist of the story was also featured in two stories (Chinese Sandman and The Amorous Broom) in the terrific collection Pyr published a couple of years ago: New Dreams for Old. It should also be noted that Mallory story appears in the Solaris Book of New Fantasy as well.

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