Seriously, some authors are so good at keeping people up at night – unable to put their books down – that it’s a wonder they’re not sued because of productivity lost due to lack of sleep. Which author prompted this observation? David Brin.

I’ve been rereading Brightness Reef (part one of the second Uplift Trilogy) and, even though I’ve been very tired much of the time lately, it was still a struggle to put the book down nearly an hour after I’d meant to go to sleep. And this was, as I say, rereading the book, so I knew damn well what was going to happen!

So while I definitely recommend reading David Brin’s works, especially those set in the Uplift universe, I advice you not to read them late at night. Unless of course you can sleep in the next morning and don’t mind being up very, very late.

I’ve been quite tired lately, but it seems to be getting a bit better. So, two months after I’d meant to, I’ve started a new podcast. The advantage to waiting is that I now have a much better name for it than I did 2 months ago. Cosmic Duct Tape is a great name, and I could get the domain name for it.

I won’t claim to be wildly enthousiastic about the quality of this first episode, but it’s good enough for a first episode. As a rule the first episode is the worst any podcast has to offer anyway. And anyway I can always cheer myself up by thinking it could have been much worse. I don’t even have to try very hard to make a worse podcast episode.