Back when I lived in San Francisco, the nice people at Borderlands Books did this super-cool thing where they’d take orders for my books, along with details for personal inscriptions, then get me to sign them when I dropped round the store, and ship them for free within the US (and for a modest fee elsewhere).

Of course, that became a lot less practical last winter, when I moved to London. But you’ve got another chance to get a signed, inscribed book shipped right to your door: I’m swinging briefly through SF in June (and I do mean *briefly* — sorry, no time to socialize) and I’m gonna stop by Borderlands and sign any stock that they have. If you get your order in before June 15, I’ll sign your copy that week and you’ll have it before July 1 — pretty cool!

Borderlands’ contact info is

866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA 94110 USA
415 824-8203
888 893-4008

Call or email them with your order and payment details and they’ll get you sorted out.

The 2004 Aurora Award nomination form is up online — this is the award given to the best science fiction works by Canadians or people living in Canada. Canadians and people living in Canada are eligible to nominate.

For the record, my eligible works for this ballot are:

Best Novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Tor, January 2003

Best Short-Form Work: Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers, Asimov’s, June 2003

Flowers From Alice, New Faces in Science Fiction (Mike Resnick, ed.), December, 2003

Printed Meat and Nattering Packages, Business 2.0, May 2003

Road Calls Me Dear, The Mammoth Book of Road Stories, January 2003

Nominations are due July 17th (my birthday!).

Jill Smith has begun a distributed audiobook project for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whose new, liberal Creative Commons license allows for exactly this kind of mishegas (see the distributed audiobook project for Lessig’s Free Culture for an example of how well this can work). She’s recorded a reading of the prologue and posted it to the Internet Archive’s public submission area, where open-licensed material is hosted for free.

I’m immensely gratified by this — audiobooks are my favorite nontextual medium for storytelling and I can’t fall asleep at night without one. I would love for others to take Jill’s lead and finish it out.

(Thanks Jill!)

I’ve just gotten word that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has qualified for the Preliminary Ballot for the 2004 Nebula Awards. That’s still a ways off — the book still has to make the final ballot in spring 2005, and then the award will be announced in April 2005. But this is a hell of a mitzvah, I gotta say.