The coming soon is coming sooner. Long awaited, the second volume of the Grapple Annual is, I hear, coming this way. If not just around the corner, then surely it is just down the street and couple of blocks to the left. Some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Canberra to be born. Should we be bewaring the ides of March? Or April? Or even February? Dunno. But I hear that it is coming.

Sergeant Burns is a character that/who has been living inside my head for a long time. He had a little peek out of my third eye hole a few years ago, courtesy of my self-trephination (there are some who say the pineal gland is not meant to see the light of day. Who says it doesn’t already? I just wanted to let some air in. Are these the same few who would restrict surgery for the elite, and deny it to the masses? I speak of the performance thereof. But now is not the time to discuss Amateur surgery. I capitalise Amateur in the spirit of the Olympics. But I digress. And where would the fun be in life if we didn’t?), in his initial public appearance a few years ago in the first Grapple Annual, which published his Penultimate Report. And now he wakes me from my sleep, demanding I record his final adventures. Another character, little harmless (I think there is a spelling mistake there somewhere) MacGuffin, spends a few moments in the daylight in the second Grapple, before being replaced in his cupboard, or setting off to interstellar darkness, or both, or perhaps I just can’t remember which.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction, celibating or is that celebrating Robert Heinlein’s birthday as I colonise July in the Grapple Annual. Coming soon-ish.

– Braille by Louis Klee (4 January)
– Hydra by Emma Marie Jones (11 January)
– 28 January by Soraya Morayef (28 January)
– Loss by Alice Bishop (7 February)
– Racey Friends – looking by Paden Hunter (12 February)
– Nightdriving by Alexander Bennetts (28 February)
– Fairy Goddaughter by Sarah Pritchard (6 March)
– Beware the Ides of March! by Sam Brien (15 March)
– The Connected World by David C Mahler (21 March)
– Visiting Richard Yates by Elizabeth Caplice (25 March)
– March Camping, 1990s by Christopher Evans (26 March)
– Dreamcast Monolith with Undergrowth by Alice Carroll (31 March)
– Meander, Triste and Awe by Brett Canét-Gibson (14th April)
– Divine Vinyl by Owen Heitmann (16 April)
– From JG Ballard, July 1966 (behind Foot Locker, August 2013) by Andrew Galan (19 April)
– Today I Feel Like Remembering by Anna Jacobson (22 April)
– Thoughts on art and the ways it reaches you by Sandra Hajda (29 April)
– May, The Opening by Ben Walter (1 May)
– Mahala by Fikret Pajalic (5 May)
– The Drunk and the Flower Man by Nathan Fioritti (11 May)
– What If? by Miranda Cashin (15 May)
– The River Fisher’s Daughter by Kirk Marshall (25 May)
– Baby Emma by Emma Makepeace (1 June)
– All these places have their moments by Madeline Karurtz (12 June)
– After Life by Lauren Briggs (23 June)
– The Golden Age of Science Fiction by David Stevens (7 July)
– The 8th July in History by Safdar Ahmed (8 July)
– Positive Space by Lynley Eavis (21 July)
– The End of Days by Jack Martinez (1 August)
– When They Were Young by Shuang West (13 August)
– Audley by Humyara Mahbub (14 August)
– The Gurindji People by Mandy Ord (16 August)
– Go Troppo by Isabelle Li (17 September)
– Campo de’ Fiori by Ashley Capes (22 September)
– Rule Ten by Gregory Wolos (28 September)
– Four Confessions That I’ve Been Meaning to Confess Since That Evening When We Made Guacamole and I Compared All Three Avocados to my Womb, Which Might’ve Made You Uncomfortable but I Couldn’t Tell for Sure by Kayla Pongrac (29 September)
– Pilot Episode, October 2nd by Lauren Paredes (2 October)
– I Desire; I Have Our Home by Emma Rose Smith (2 November)
– Great Emu War by Eleri Mai Harris (8 November)
– Lucia by Lucy Hunter (13 December)
– An ordinary domestic pattern was disclosed by Monica Carroll (17 December)
– Time Zones by Jake Lawrence (30 December)