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So first came the news that the Nebula Awards final ballot had been released, and that Tim Pratt's story "Little Gods," published at SH just over a year ago, had been added to the ballot by the jury.

(For those unfamiliar with how the Nebula works: SFWA members recommend works for the Nebula all year; any work that gets 10 or more recommendations, before its eligibility period (complicated) expires, gets put on the preliminary ballot; SFWA members vote on the preliminary ballot to produce a final ballot that consists of the top 5 items in each category (novel, novella, novelette, short story, script); SFWA members then vote again on the final ballot to pick an item in each category to receive the award. In addition, there are three juries (novel, short fiction, script); a jury is a group of SFWA members who read a whole bunch of stuff published that year and can at their discretion add one item to their category or categories on the final ballot. Tim's story had received a fair number of recommendations before the preliminary ballot was determined, but not quite enough to get on the ballot; the short-story jury decided to add that story to the ballot.)

So there was much excitement over that all morning. We at SH are, of course, thoroughly delighted; as far as we can tell, this is only the fifth electronically published work ever to appear on a final Nebula ballot, and only the second in the short-story category.

Meanwhile, discussion shifted into higher gear over at Susan's journal, requiring me to read Alan DeNiro's latest quasi-manifesto "The Dream of the Unified Field" (that's a PDF file, btw). And I kept going by the SFWA site and looking at various private SFWA newsgroups trying to find out what was public knowledge about the Nebula final ballot and what wasn't. And the chat email list I'm on also chose today to shift into high gear, with several dozen messages posted, mostly on the topic of whether to split the list into two, with a separate list for no-holds-barred debate that some people (me included, these days) have a hard time dealing with the tone of.

And I saw the latest Buffy episode last night, so I could finally read backlogged email discussion of that. And submission volume suddenly picked up again—we were getting 4 or 5 subs a day last week, and it went up to about 12 today. So what with one thing and another, it's been an exciting day of online adventure, to the point that I didn't get around to eating lunch until an hour or two later than usual. I did get some work done at work, but not as much as I'd intended.

Of course, the plan was that I would come home after work and do some editing, but that didn't happen either. But I think I'd better go make it happen, at least for a little while before collapsing.