Yesterday was an excellent mail day down at the post office. The box held page proofs for my contribution to an upcoming reprint anthology and, even better, the recent issue of Hayakawa's SF Magazine which included a translation of "The Voluntary State." The translator, Yoshio Kobayashi, has an article in the magazine about American science fiction as well, and it apparently features some talk of me and my buds Richard and Ben. I think that the substance of the article (I don't read Japanese, unfortunately) is probably similar to that of this conversation at Strange Horizons Yoshio had with Say... alumni Chris Barzak and K. Bird Lincoln.
As exciting as it to see my story translated into another language for the first time (the same story is also scheduled to appear soon in Greek, Hebrew and Danish, and maybe a couple of other languages) the coolest thing by far about this is the illustrations. The piece is accompanied by three full page drawings by one Nara Kihachi, who clearly read the story with some care, and just as clearly has a sense of humor. I'm going to try to track the guy down to see if I can get his permission to reprint one or more of the illustrations here. I've always been lucky in my illustrations, but I can say without a doubt that I've never been more delighted.
Now, as to ribs. I mentioned the post office at the top of this entry. Well, a few weeks ago I had a bicycle wreck of the Hollywood/special effects variety turning into that selfsame P.O. off of High Street. In my defense, I had literally just left the bike shop where I'd had new brakes installed, so I wasn't used to the significantly higher, uh, grab factor I had to deal with. Anyway, there was skidding and flipping and general crashing and so on, but I pretty much felt that the whole thing went as well as it could have and went about my life.
Cut to yesterday morning, when I'm at the student health clinic getting some blood work done as a follow up to an earlier visit, and also asking about some discomfort I've been having in my side. As it turns out, I broke the two lower ribs on my right side in that crash. Which is a better diagnosis than my theory, which had to do with liver inflammation and vitamin toxicity and stuff. My doctor told me to stop watching House, and also told me that my liver is about four inches lower down than where the pain is. Doctors think they're sooo smart.
So there's that. In other news, the wireless router at the house is apparently on the fritz (I'm typepadding live from right here) so I'm sure I'm getting farther and farther behind on e-mail and news and weather and so on. Hopefully I'll get the connectivity sorted out this afternoon, but if you don't hear much from us in the next couple of days, that's why.