My latest Locus column, “What I Do,” is a pretty thorough inventory of the apps, OSes, hardware and services I use on a day to day basis:

From time to time, people ask me for an inventory of the tools and systems I use to get my work done. As a hard-traveling, working writer, I spend a lot of time tinkering with my tools and systems. At the risk of descending into self-indulgence (every columnist’s occasional privilege), I’m going to try to create a brief inventory, along with a wish/to-do list for the next round.

What I Do

John Clute’s smashing review of For the Win in the latest Strange Horizons compares the book (and me) to Heinlein in his heyday. Color me delighted!

There are a lot of MMORPG battles in the first half of the book, and a lot of lessons—much more interesting —about gameworld economies, and gold farming, and derivatives, in the second. The climax of the tale is double: an at times kinetically arousing narrative of the joining of the oppressed of the world and gameworlds in worldwide strike actions; and a neat narrative—infodumps hanging into the page whenever necessary — explaining how the greedy corporations of the world have been lured into a ponzi scheme engineered by members of our extremely clever crew, and how these corporations are forced into a humiliating climb-down at the very end: in the line of SF created by Heinlein, proper mousetraps trap proper mice: period.

Doctorow doesn’t write a bad sentence; he doesn’t even ever write a sentence you have to read twice. You can feel story pounding through the arteries of For the Win

I’m absolutely delighted to announce that my novel Makers has made the shortlist for Canada’s Sunburst Award, a juried prize “presented annually to Canadian writers with a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection of speculative fiction published any time during the previous calendar year.”

I’ve won the Sunburst twice before — once in 2003 for my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and again in 2009 for my novel Little Brother. I’m so pleased to be honored again, and to be listed among such worthy colleagues on the shortlist.

Here’s the video from last night’s talk at New America Foundation in DC — thanks to everyone who helped organize it and all those who attended!

Here’s an interview I conducted with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on the occasion of the Hebrew publication of Little Brother.

בראיון טלפוני עמו מתגלה דוקטורוב כאדם חריף ומהיר מחשבה. הוא מודה כי הוא לחוץ במעט מאחר שעליו להשלים כתיבה של שני ספרים אבל הדבר לא מונע ממנו לענות תשובות מנומקות.

כשהוא נשאל כיצד הוא אמור להתפרנס מספרו אם הוא ניתן להורדה חינם באינטרנט, הוא עונה כי “בכך שאני מאפשר הפצת ספרים בחינם יותר קוראים פוטנציאליים נחשפים אליהם. כפי שטים אוריילי (פעיל בתנועות למען קוד פתוח, א”ש) נוהג לומר, הסכנה לאמן היא לא פיראטיות, אלא אנונימיות”.