I had emergency surgery on Wednesday. As far as “emergency surgery” goes it was a breeze—great surgical team, laparoscopic without complications on a problem that was caught with time to spare. I have a relatively easy recovery ahead, and the pain is manageable (so far) with over the counter meds. But “as far as emergency surgery goes” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and so is “relatively easy.”

To make a long story short: I’ve had to cancel my planned appearance at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting tonight. The meeting will go ahead, but without me as speaker.

I wish it didn’t have to be this way—particularly after having to cancel on these same fine folks in November due to pneumonia. I’d intended this as a sort of make-up event. To any of you who arranged to travel to Philadelphia for the PSFS meeting: I’m sorry I won’t get to see you in person this time. I hope we get a chance to meet soon! My body didn’t take editorial direction on this one.

I’m doing fine—comforted by family and friends, covered by insurance1, with time to recover. (Though, as is the way of such things, my editor sent me copy edits for my next book the day after I came back from the hospital.) It’s an occasion for reflection, to be sure. Today, this was about as routine a procedure as you could imagine, but two hundred years ago it could have been a death sentence. Even a couple decades back I would have been laid out for a longer, more agonizing recovery. I went for a walk in the woods yesterday. Three cheers for modern medicine!

Also, if I have offended any witches or tutelary deities in the city of Philadelphia (I guess that’s Gritty?), let me tender my most heartfelt apologies and offer what reasonable recompense lies within my (presently meager) powers.

The next bit is the good news. I’m happy to announce the Craft Countdown book club!

Gearing up for the release of Dead Hand Rule in October, I thought it would be fun to hold a Craft Sequence / Craft Wars book club read along, and Hannah at the Hidden Schools fan-site was excited to help with ideation, organization, and graphic design. Every month through October, we’ll read one Craft book, and host a discussion about it (final venue TBD, but as of this writing I think we’re mostly settled on the Craft Sequence subreddit). I’ll write up some book club discussion questions on the last Tuesday of the month, and drop in on the Thursday of that same week for an AMA-style question and answer session.

We’ll be reading the series in publication order, starting with Three Parts Dead at the end of this month, with the book club questions on Tuesday March 25th and the AMA on Thursday March 27th. It’s a short window, but it’s not a very long book (I didn’t start writing long until I started writing by hand and I have no idea how that works either2) and for many of you this will be a re-read.

I hope you’ll join us. I’m excited to chat about the series, about how it’s grown and changed over time, and to get us all ready for the next step.

Recent reading:

• I’m about 160 pages into Metal from Heaven and loving it. It’s densely written, broken-glass prose, vivid and heartbreaking and sharp and sexy. I’d caution against leaning too heavily on the back cover pitch, which might give you a false sense that the pacing is off. Genre work doesn’t do bildungsroman as much as it used to—this reminds me of some of Mike Ford’s novels, where you’re following a character’s growth to maturity in a strange, exciting world. If you read a blurb about The Final Reflection that was all about the final mission, you’d wonder why we’re spending the first half of the book on this kid’s gladiator childhood, his education, his adoptive father’s disgrace, his early career in the Klingon navy. I’ve only ever seen the first two episodes of Arcane on Netflix but if you liked that I think you would like this. There’s train robberies and barfights and bad decisions and theology and eros.

• One of the perks of this gig is getting to read books a bit earlier than everyone else and let me tell you, when you’re laid up in surgical recovery and you know exactly what you want and it’s a book that’s not out yet but you remember that you got sent an e-ARC a while back—what a fine feeling. Django Wexler’s Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Except Me) is everything I wanted, it’s all that and a bag of chips, a great conclusion to and evolution of the time-loop fantasy madness concept of the first book. Davi’s voice is addictive, and Django brings the whole show to a bravura landing. Put this one on your calendars, and check out the first if you haven’t already.