An April Fool’s Sunset. In real life, it was even prettier than this.

And now, a couple of linky bits, all of which are at least tangentially related to me, because I’m a rampant egotist like that:

* Because I was avoiding being online yesterday, I didn’t link to the April Fool’s Day SFWA candidacies, in which Jeff VanderMeer, Jay Lake and others announced their own write-in campaigns. Andrew Wheeler has a good collection of all the usurpers over at his SFBC BookBlogger site.

* Simon Owens of Bloggasm looks at the Creative Commons releases of Move Under Ground and Blindsight by Nick Mamatas and Peter Watts, respectively, and how they’ve affected the lives of those books and their authors. Oddly to me, Owens doesn’t note Blindsight’s Hugo nomination; to my mind it’s pretty clear that Watts releasing the book under CC (and the subsequent pimping at Boing Boing, here and other places online) pushed the book into Hugo consideration status.

* Over at the Hugo-nominated Drink Tank fanzine, the equally Hugo-nominated Chris Garcia handicaps the Hugo slate this year (pdf link). How’s that for recursive?

* If you ever wanted to know how much money Tobias Buckell makes, he’s spilling the beans today. Going freelance has been good for him, apparently. I could have told him that (and I did, now that I think about it).

… life is Skittles and life is beer. Or, combining the two, Skittlebrau. Mmmmm… Skittlebrau.

First, if you’d like to see more lovely pictures of a spring day here at the Scalzi Compound, complete with cherry blossoms, basketball-playing children and an impossibly green lawn the size of some of the smaller states in the union, go here. You won’t be disappointed, and if you’re disappointed, maybe your standards are just too damn high.

Second, as many of you know, April is going to be an amazingly busy month for me. In addition to work on the Android’s Dream sequel, and the release of The Last Colony, and the continuing SFWA presidential campaign, I have a tremendous amount of other travel and activity. I’ll be going to San Diego this week to give a presentation at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law; next week I’m doing fiction-writing lectures at the writer’s workshop at Sinclair College here in Dayton, the weekend after that I’m at Penguicon in Michigan and then after that, I start the book tour, which will see me on the road through the second week of May.

What does this mean for you, o dear and treasured reader of the Whatever? Well, to begin, my publishing schedule for the Whatever is likely to change slightly. I’ve been updating here at will, and often in the morning, but through the start of the book tour I’m going to be devoting the morning and early afternoon hours around here to working on the novel, so I’m unlikely to be updating around here until the afternoon. And once I am on the book tour, I’m unlikely to be updating at any great length, because all the traveling and speaking and signing and wild groupie carnality is likely to tucker me out. Indeed, I am thinking of asking a couple of people to come in as guest bloggers during this time to keep the shelves stocked. I’ll make a decision about that sometime soon; clearly, I’ll let you know.

The main takeaway here is that April is likely to be the craziest month I’ve had in a very long time and will require some forebearance on your part as I fiddle with my publishing schedule so that my head doesn’t explode trying to get everything done that I need to get done. I hope you understand; I’m sure you do.

The good news is that so far everything seems to be well. The writing of TAD2 is coming along fine; the first chapter features multiple simultaneous attempted political assassinations on a golf course, and after that it gets a little weird. I’m trying to get out all the author interviews I have scheduled for April and May out the door to the authors in the next week or so in order to have them ready to go when I’m on the road; I’ve added a couple exciting names to the interview list, who I think you’re going to enjoy. And I’m trying to co-ordinate seeing friends and Whatever folks when I am on the tour, so hopefully I’ll get to hang with all y’all when I’m on the road.

It’s all very exciting, and I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I think I’ll be glad when it’s all over and I get to be relaxed and at home once more. For now, however, I juggle. At least it’s good weather for it.