For everyone who is wondering: Yes, I’m still going to go to the Creation Museum. However, it probably won’t be until November, due to a travel-intensive October (I had a trip to Chicago, and have two other trips this month, to California and to France, respectively). My goal now is to get there before Thanksgiving. Then I can say “Thank God! I am done with the Creation Museum!”

Honestly, however, despite my earlier dread, I am now looking forward to it. And there are some advantages to the delay, namely that as I understand it all the exhibits are finally in. So I’ll have a total religious experience. And that’s what you want, when you go for that sort of thing.

Again, however, apologies for the delay. I didn’t expect trying to get there to take on such epic proportions in itself.

While I’m thinking about it, let me catch you up on some news of mine on the book front.

1. Zoe’s Tale has been pushed back from its original May release date to August. Thankfully, this is not because I’ve been a flake and have gotten behind on the writing (…..) but because of marketing algebra on Tor’s part to assure the book’s total global domination. Naturally, I can’t argue with that. It also means that The High Castle has also been moved and will now likely appear in early 2009. But the good news is, hey, I’ll still be publishing two years from now. Go me.

2. For those of you who can’t possibly live until next August before getting something else from me, I’ll remind you that The Android’s Dream debuts in paperback on October 30, so if you haven’t caught up with that book, you’ll have some lovely Halloween reading. Also, I’m talking to Subterranean Press about possibly having a couple of new shorter things out and about in the first part of ’08. No promises there — right now, finishing up Zoe’s Tale is the priority — but if we can swing it, I’ll definitely be talking about it.

3. Speaking of Subterranean Press, you limited editions fans will be happy to know that The Last Colony will be getting the deluxe treatment there, so the entire OMW trilogy will be available in special signed editions. Even better, the artwork for the TLC limited will be done by Vincent Chong, who did such a spectacular job on the artwork for the first two books in the series. Personally, my head is going to explode waiting to see what he does with TLC. There are worse positions to be in.

4.  Foreign sales news: If you have friends in South Korea — and who among us doesn’t? — you can let them know a Korean-language version of Old Man’s War is on the way sometime soon, because we’ve sold the rights there. This brings to an even dozen the total number of languages the book has been either published or sold in. Which, you know. Makes me feel all shiny.

So that’s the book news at the moment.

This is probably going to sound a little stupid, but it’s actually psychically nice to have the Whatever working. Having the site down and/or in various states of internal implosion was actually not very good for me; it’s one thing to decide to take a week or two from the site because I want to, and to have the site down for a better part of a month because one part of it doesn’t want to play nice with the other part. I regret to say that crap like that distracts me intensely; I’m not particularly zen when one of my main avenues of play and steam release (and, yes, also publicity and business) gets pulled out from under me.

Now, whether WordPress will cause me grief over time is something I’ll have to see, but so far, so good. The site handled 18k unique visitors yesterday without either a blip or complaint from my host. I’m down a bit from the usual attendance, but then again, I’ve been not writing here for weeks at a time recently, so, really, what should I expect. I’ll deal with any glitches that come as we get back up to cruising speed. But for now, hey, I got my site back, and that’s a pretty happy feeling.

I’ll probably continue to do additional fiddling, and building out of the site over the next several days, but it’ll be mostly minor stuff, and I can’t imagine that most of you will care one way or another, and I’m pretty fed up with it myself, so my plan is to just stop talking about it and start writing about other stuff for a while. IF you have suggestions for topics, by all means put them in the comment thread. I could use a kick start after sputtering about for so long.