Kris Dikeman, a member of my writing group, Altered Fluid, wrote a brilliant story called “Nine Sundays in a Row” which Strange Horizons had the good sense to publish.

The story was also recently recognized in the top ten list for the storySouth Million Writers Award. You can vote for it for best story of the year. I urge you to check out the story and then go and vote.

Despite nearly 30 years producing music together, or perhaps because of it, The Church, the band you know from “Under the Milky Way”, has just released one of the best albums of its career. Untitled #23, which released May 12 in the US, is a stunning achievement, an album that is a revelation from start to finish, an album that is undeniably the Church and yet is a product of their evolution as a band. It’s rare that I find an album where every song shines, and yet this is one. Without a proper title or even proper cover art, the album lets its songs speak for themselves, and they are relentless, they surround and invade at the same time. But it creates a kind of equilibrium, and you end up feeling like you’re floating. Sometimes in lush, ethereal skies, sometimes in the vast blackness of space, and still others in dense, multicolored seas.

It’s amazing to see a band of their longevity (at least 23 albums) in such top shape. Part of this comes from their proficiency, no doubt, part of it from the confidence that gives them. But I suspect it also has to do with their love of the music. The Church’s heyday (pun intended) was long ago, at least by the measure of their popular success, but they’ve continued to produce great albums and I think that by now they must have given up any real hope of recapturing the profile they once had and simply do it because they play well together. That musical chemistry is readily apparent in this album.

It’s also part of a prolific onslaught from the band. Within the last few months they’ve also released two EPs (Pangaea and Coffee Hounds, both superb) and these come on the heels of solo releases from both Steve Kilbey (Painkiller) and Marty Willlson-Piper (Nightjar). It’s a good time to be a Church fan, but also a good time to become one. All of the albums (though not the EPs) are available from online retailers such as Amazon.com, but also from Second Motion Records as CDs or digital downloads. They’re also on iTunes. I urge you to check them out – at the very least Untitled #23. It deserves a listen.

My thoughts on the Season Five Finale of Lost can be found here (at Tor.com).

It was a bit mindblowing, but I’m getting a few uncomfortable BSG vibes from the show now.

I feel like everyone I know has been to see Star Trek already. As usual, I am late to the party. I will rectify that tonight, however. In a way, though, I’m glad that some of the hype has been tempered by people having more critical opinions. I still haven’t seen too many people saying it wasn’t good, but I would rather go in expecting decent and not the best movie I’ve seen in recent times.

Tomorrow night is the Lost finale and it’s something I’m looking forward to more eagerly than I am Star Trek. I know Lost lost a lot of people a while back, but I have to say that it’s my favorite show on television. That title used to belong to Battlestar Galactica, but even in this past season, I found myself appreciating Lost more.

The Lost finale will also mark the end of cable television for me, for now at least. I’ve never been one to find that television was bad, or somehow lesser than other forms of media, but I do find that I spend too much time watching it lately. And I continue to stare at the books that line my bookshelves wondering when I’ll have the time to read them. So – no more television. Which isn’t to say that I won’t watch television shows – I will via downloads and DVD. I expect to watch more movies and actually take advantage of my Netflix subscription and the watch on demand service they offer. But I really want to read more and I figure this will help. I will also save some money in the deal.

Speaking of books, I finally finished Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun about a week ago and I’ve already started in on Urth of the New Sun, the sequel. I was originally going to wait, but I found that I couldn’t. I wanted a continuation of the story right away.

I’ll plan on writing a lengthier post on the books soon as I feel they deserve one. After this one, though, I intend to take a break and catch up on other reading.

More to come later…

Sorry, by the way, for the string of code at the beginning of recent entries, especially if you’re reading this on LJ or in a feed reader. Apparently that happens when I write a post in Word and then copy and paste it into the WordPress software. I’ll try to be more diligent about catching that in the future.