2AM: Not a good time to start reading.

So, after being up not overly late and conversing about short stories, I bounced along the web's links to various short stories. Oh, neat, A Study In Emerald is available online. I'd already read it, but it's an excellent short story: think Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulu (and delivered with Neil Gaiman's excellent prose). Oh hey, my favorite Gaiman short story is also online: How To Talk To Girls At Parties. This goes on for a while, but so far I am lucky and I have already read the stories I find that are online. Some I am looking for are not online - China Miéville's collection Looking For Jake, which has perhaps the scariest story I have read. I end up looking at various author's wikipedia entries, for they contain some information about upcoming books, when I hit a landmine.

John Scalzi's wikipedia entry mentions that "Agent To The Stars", the one book of his that I hadn't read, was originally published on the web. It's very familiar though. Oh, because there was a limited edition hardcover release, with Mike Krahulik providing cover art! Apparently there's a paperback release now - It says Oct 2008, so I must have missed it but I need to go buy it, now. But the entire story is still online!

You know how the next few hours went. Should you have time for a great story, go read it. But I don't recommend starting at 2am, for you'll still be up a few hours later, finishing it.