Karl Schroeder will be Writer in Residence at the Merril Collection for three months starting February 1. There will be a little afternoon reception at the main Toronto Reference Library at 789 Yonge Street on Monday, February 1 at 1:30-3:30 PM. (Karl says “Please come, or else I’ll be surrounded by librarians!”) Karl will be conducting three writers workshops over the next few months. He will also critique manuscripts up to 5000 words (so like a dozen flash fiction pieces or half a chapter of a doorstop fantasy, I’m leaning towards the latter). I took a class in writing science fiction that Karl taught at George Brown back in the ’90s. Stephanie Bedwell-Grime was in the class and she’s done amazing things since, as has Karl himself. Contact the Merril Collection library for further details.

USS Hudson Bay (IDIC) is having their regular monthly meeting at the North York Public Library on Saturday, January 30 starting around 1:30 PM. Aside from the usual nice people, a bunch of our filker friends are showing up to perform, including our filk guest of honor Karen Linsley and our filk program person, Sue Jeffers. Guaranteed to be fun.

So we’ll keep the calendar up to date. I’m off to the NASFiC meeting in Raleigh on Friday, but I’ll be back next week. See some of you at First Thursday!

I’ve created an online events calendar for SFContario members and committee here at http://sfcontario.ca/calendar.

The calendar serves two public purposes. It tells everyone where we are planning to be, so that people can ask questions or buy memberships from us in person. And it tells the committee about events we need to be aware of, in order to avoid conflicts. (Or in some cases, to let us know when we need to be in two places at once: Ad Astra and FilKontario are again the same weekend in April this year unfortunately, as are Anime North and Bloody Words in May.)

Although we are listing conventions in our calendar, we’re not intending this to be a convention calendar, i.e. we only plan to list conventions where SFContario members will be available to sell memberships.

It would have been very much simpler to create hand-coded HTML pages than to write a thousand lines of PHP code, but our internal reason for doing this is that the database back end will be used to create our online program database. I’ve been able to do a lot of layout and debugging in a safe and painless setting, which will make creating the program database a lot easier.

So, enjoy, and I hope this is useful to some of you. If you have an event you want us to know about, let us know. We expect a few of our committee members to be working on other conventions, so we’re happy to list concom meetings here for reference. If you are a member of the SFContario concom and you want to be able to add or edit events in the calendar, let me know and I can create a user account.

Another success in the series of high-in-the-sky soirees hosted by Rob Sawyer and Carolyn Clink occurred last Saturday. Attendance was international in scope: Buffalo, N.Y. was well represented.

I have read the three chapbooks I brought home with me: “Here There Be Monsters” by Bud Carson; “Sphinx!” by Tony Pi; “Radio Nowhere” by Douglas Smith.

“Radio Nowhere” I liked the best. I am putting it aside for our younger son who is in his third year at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo. “Radio Nowhere” is set on the campus of neighbouring University of Waterloo.

All three of these short stories are eligible for nomination for a 2010 Aurora Award .