Interrupting my busy work day to let you know that if you are so inclined, Subterranean Press has made the Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 editions of its magazine available to you — for free! — in both mobi and ePub format, and without DRM (because boo! DRM!). In the magazines you’ll find fabulous fiction by Nnedi Okorafor, Walter Jon Williams and others. And if you like it, good news, because the magazine’s future editions will also be made free available, or so I am told.

Now that you’re sufficiently excited to have something to read for the weekend, here’s the link with all the details and downloads. Happy reading!

A few things, mostly relating to me. 

* First, a look at 2013′s first appearance of the Scalzi River:

This is the stream that shows up in my yard when we get huge amounts of rain, or in this case, lots of rain plus snow melt (it’ll be about 60 degrees here today). We installed new piping and drains in our yard so we don’t see the Scalzi River nearly as much as we used to, but given how much snow was around recently, it’s not entirely surprising the underground drainage system we have in the yard is not handling it all. With luck this will be gone by the afternoon. If not: I go sailing.

* Our fundraiser for Jay Lake launched yesterday afternoon, and in less than twenty four hours it’s reached just about $30,000, or triple what we had hoped for. That’s amazing to me and I’m deeply appreciative to those of you who have chosen to help out my pal Jay. Thank you. For those of you who are wondering, any money raised that does not go to Jay’s genome sequencing will go to give Jay a leave of absence from his work — through all of his cancer travails and everything else around it, Jay’s been working as close to full time as he can under the circumstances. He could use a break.

The acts of whimsy that had been pledged have already started to come out. Here’s Mary Robinette Kowal reading classic literature with her sex phone voice, as a start; more are on the way. Mine — a performance of a “lost” “Bob Dylan” “song,” performed in a Dylanesque fashion, will surface on Monday. That gives you the entire weekend to prepare yourself. It may not be enough time.

* I was asked recently how my “deflabination” project was coming along. The answer: reasonably well, thank you. When I stepped off the scale on December first, I was 180 pounds; at this morning’s weigh-in I was 171.8. So I’ve dropped about eight pounds in six weeks, which is slightly ahead of my pound a week goal. This includes eight days of caloric impropriety between my daughter’s birthday on the 23rd and New Year’s Day, so overall I’m pretty pleased. My target weight range is between 160 and 165, so I have a bit further to go.

As with the last time I worked to lose weight, the secret here is no secret: I’m counting calories and doing a little bit of exercise. It’s boring and undramatic, but strangely enough it works. My only other tactic (again, same as last time) is to recognize it’s a long-term project so the occasional day over the calorie goal is not an occasion for self-flagellation. Yesterday I ate at Wendy’s and had a 700-calorie bomb in the form of a “Son of Baconator” hamburger, for example. And it was good, and I would do it again (although probably not this week). The point of the calorie counting is to moderate and track intake, not to live a life monastic privation.

And that’s where things are today. Most of my day today will be given over to finishing up some stuff on a deadline, so catch you all probably rather later in the pm. Find something to do with yourself. I hear origami’s fun.