I hope you've all ordered your copy of the 200th issue of Overland, due to be launched in a shower of bubbly at the Melbourne Writers Festival on September 4. I will be there, as I contributed an essay on Australian theatre and nationalism. And tomorrow, as a spin-off, I will appear with some of my fellow contributors in a shipping container on Riverside Terrace at Fed Square for a Melbourne Writers Festival event called "Magazine". Overland editor Jeff Sparrow will be wrangling Kalinda Ashton, Rjurik Davidson, Michelle Carmody and Jacinda Woodhead as well as me, nailing us into the hot-seat and asking probing questions for a magazine-style 15 minutes of fame. It goes from 10am to 1.30pm, and I'm on about 11.30. Please come!

This begins a crazy fortnight or so of heavy litting. For a lot of it I'll be hanging at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, where I have a busy program of panels. It's my first Con, and I'm as excited as any 13 year old fangirl. I'll post details later and probably elsewhere, for any closet nerds out there. But tellingly, even in the heart of SFF city, I'm doing two panels about theatre ...