I’ve been busy dealing with all kinds of fiddly things this week, including a zillion medical appointments, but, hey, we’re off to the Columbia Gorge for a few days next week, so my outlook will perk up considerably. Not that it’s bad now, just mildly tedious. Though, hmmn, nope, not even tedious, not when the trees are all blossoming and the sun is preparing to shine. Again. That will make three times in one week, which is a record so far this year. I think I might pass out. (Oh, wait, that would mean more fucking medical appointments. I think I’ll just pass.)

Next month I might have a couple of announcements. There again, I might not. We’ll just have to see. Yes, I’m being cryptic, but there’s no point talking about stuff until it’s ironclad.

Meanwhile, here are some bits and bobs of stuff:

  • Over at Lambda Literary, a complete list of Publishing Triangle Award winners. Particular congratulations to occasional AN visitor, Katherine Beuter, Alcestis, which took the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.
  • I’d like you all to welcome our friend Jon Anastasio, Leadership Learning expert, to the wild world of social media. His website is here. Guess who did the photos…
  • Sterling Editing has some nifty links for writers, including my favourite, a sketch of how it really feels to be a writer.
  • The Women’s Funding Alliance (which I talked about yesterday) raised nearly $400,000 at their event. If you’d like to help them support women and girls in the Northwest, let’s see if we can push them the rest of the way.
  • Last, and definitely most difficult: Joanna Russ died yesterday. Locus has a preliminary obit, and over at io9 Annaleen Newnitz explains why you should read Russ’s books.

Joanna Russ was a giant. As John-Henri Holmberg points out, one of our Modernist masters. She was witty, she could be savage, she was always honest. She influenced fiction way beyond the intimate gravity well of f/sf. I’d like to see a Modern Library edition of her work. Her most important writing, in my opinion, was her short fiction (“Mystery of the Young Gentleman,” “When It Changed” “Picnic on Paradise”) and her non-fiction. (How to Suppress Women’s Writing, To Write Like a Woman).

I’m not able to explain today just how much her work meant to me, how very important it is. But Ammonite, for example, simply couldn’t have existed without her foundation.

Go read Farah Mendlesohn’s On Joanna Russ. Perhaps at some point I’ll be able to think clearly. For now: I regret that I never met her.