Having revealed this fact during the writers panel which I hosted in Icon, I can now state it here as well: My book "A Devil of a Writer" (or "One Hell of a Writer", or "כתוב כשד משחת"), a story collection, will be published by Odyssey Publishing, and should be ready sometime before next April.
So I'm happy. Sue me.

The panel itself, by the way, was better than the one last year and the one of the year before. I think so because I decided that it should be so, and Guy and Lavie think so because they attended said panels. I presented Mz. Tochterman as the First Lady of Israeli SF (and later repeated that, when I was host of the Gefen Award ceremony, a role which I was ask to play about 15 minutes before the actual event), and derived much pleasure from it. Of course, later she hit me with a rolled magazine, but I forgive her. After all, my book will be out before next April.
Oh, and Dorit Landes, editor of Am-Oved, attended the panel. Say what you want about Am Oved now – we all grew up with the books she translated and edited. Lavie in particular was excited about this, and I had to hit him with a rolled magazine.

Most of this week we've had Lavie staying with us, which saved him some time and saved me lots of trouble, because he, as opposed to me, has no problem talking about food. This quality of his enabled me to have lots of sleep, which I badly needed, while he entertained Keren by listening to her kitchen stories and, god forbid, telling his own.
I could never understand people talking about food. The way I see it, either there's food or there's no food. If there's food, then there's no reason to talk about food, and if there's no food, don't just stand there talking about food, you fool, go get some food.
Maybe we should adopt Lavie as a pet. He's house-trained, and a rolled-magazine is very effective with him.

It might be true that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but Guy, Lavie and I scientifically proved that there definitely is such a thing as a free dinner. Twice. First one was when Joe invited a whole gang of happy people to gain even more happiness, by way of drinks and hotdogs. Second time was when Starbase972 chairman Uri Aviv invited the three of us to dinner with director and filmmaker Roger Nygard, at the end of which the latter sneaked behind me, grabbed the bill (which I was holding at the time) and paid it all, paying no heed Uri's – and everyone else's – protests. The way he shoved Uri out of his way made me regret that he didn't attend the role-players' duels in the convention.
Now I'm convinced that more filmmakers should be invited to Icon. Was that your plan, Uri?

I also took Lavie to have breakfast at Mike's Place, near the sea. We rode Sleeper, my motorbike. I could talk for hours about Lavie's reaction to the ride, but I'll settle for mentioning that the word "underwear" was uttered a considerably greater amount of times than it should have been, and only the arrival of the food saved me from a most horrible fate.

Oh, and I bought a most delightful book, but that'll be saved for another post.