Whoa, where did the week go? How embarrassing, I aspire to do better this week. It must have something to do with the time warp we are currently in the midst of, where the calendar says it is the first week of June, but the weather report puts it at around mid-April instead. The last couple of weeks have been mostly 60 degrees, rainy and depressing, very English weather, which is great if you're in England, but wasn't supposed to be part of the package for living in the northeast.



Bid on a few groups of Target novelizations in the last week. The first batch was won easily, with no competing bids, then I didn't hear from the seller for like a week. Apparently he put a bunch of stuff on eBay, then went on vacation. It's unusual in this day and age to have to wait more than 24 hours to hear from the seller after winning an auction, but this guy was in the UK and obviously a little more laid back. Then it happens again, I won eight separate auctions from the same guy, also in the UK, for eight more Target books on June 1, and have yet to hear from anybody. He must be "on holiday" too. So I find a group of three lots of books which nobody has bid on and are from the good old US of A and aren't listed in under Doctor Who, so I bid on a couple of those, and right before the end a bidding war ensues and two of them end up going for almost twice what I wanted to pay (its the same problem with Doc Savage books, where when you're bidding on a lot you want your top price to be a multiple of the number of books you don't actually have, so that when you end up with duplicates they were essentially free. Sometimes this works, but in many cases such as today you end up getting outbid either by someone who doesn't have any of the books in the lot or else doesn't care). Almost had a heart attack too when I accidentally countered a prevailing bid of $8.50 with a bid of $1250 instead of $12.50. Figured out how to retract the bid, then you're supposed to immediately bid the amount you originally meant to, but in the meantime somebody else had already outbid that, so hopefully they don't pull the plug on my account. Usually I'm more careful, don't know quite what happened there.



I counted up now I've got (if this group of 8 ever materializes) around 100 Target novelizations, which actually have some prospect of being read during my lifetime since they're extremely short and in true fanboy fashion I've been watching the Pertwee episodes in order and reading each novelization right after. It takes longer to read the story than to watch it, so it tends to slow down the process if you have to do it for every story (for the Hartnells and Troughtons, I only read novelizations of missing stories). Its a bit of a break from the Hugo nominees, which are all great of course but can be a bit heavy at times (with two doorstops still to go in the next two months). Not going to make it to the classics group this month so I can focus on getting the Hugos done in time. I also ordered a couple of books from amazon.ca for the first time, including Christopher Priest's "The Separation" which won this year's BSFA award, and since I won't be going to England to pick up a copy personally, and also its stuck in publishing limbo, but amazon.ca had it in stock at 25% off, and I threw in the second "Arabesk" book of John Courtenay Grimwood, another BSFA nominee and sequel to the first one, "Pashazade" which was nominated last year and was probably the least interesting of the nominees, only nominally science fiction and more of an alternate universe mystery novel, but it was ok, just didn't stand up to "Chasm City" and "Lust". The other two nominees to get are M. John Harrison's "Light" and the sequel to last year's nominated Gwyneth Jones novel, which won't be available in paperback until November, but I figure I can wait until then since I probably wouldn't get around to reading it any sooner than that. Still want to get to "Redemption Ark", the third Alistair Reynolds novel which, surprisingly, wasn't nominated for the BSFA this year. It's another hefty tome, so that plus the second Uplift trilogy and a few classics group books will probably take me through to Christmas. So a liberal sprinkling of Target novelizations may be just the thing.