This week has been a little less stressful than last week, now that the pressing issues are being addressed - one of which was Carrie's car needing to be fixed. The part just came in yesterday, so we're hoping her car will be back on the road by early next week. Meanwhile she's been driving the other car (she's on the road a lot for work). This isn't so much a problem at the moment, but will be if I have any job interviews come up!

On the subject of job hunting, I've been a bit down about that lately. I'm really beginning to wonder where all the jobs are. The economy is supposed to be picking up steam, but I AIN'T SEEING IT! It doesn't help that I'm looking for IT jobs, which aren't exactly a growth area these days.

I hit Careerbuilder again late last night, but came up empty. This evening I managed to find some suitable positions on Monster and sent my resume off to those. I'll be pleased if I just receive an acknowledgement and overjoyed if I somehow manage to score an interview!

I might give Monster Networking another spin to see if I can find some more leads. After a frenzy on there a few weeks ago, I contacted about 50 people and came up with one lead, including contact details for the hiring managers involved.

I haven't heard anything more about that, nor have I heard anything about the lead I got from someone I used to work with. There's also the recruiter I had a chat with last week who has been oddly silent since then. Looks like I need to do a little prodding to see what's up :)

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By now I had hoped to finish a story for this week, but it was not to be. I'm still working on it (it's based on the crit group's "word of the week" for last week), and I have an idea for this week's word - hopefully a short flash piece this time!

I have the gist of the first story and so far I've written about 1/3rd of it. I've got an ending in mind, but I'm having trouble with the middle! This seems to be par for the course for me - I'm always able to start a story as long as the ending is in mind, but the middle is usually hazy.

Most of the ideas for the middle have been fairly bland so far. All I need is something that does justice to the concept and really explores the possibilities. I'm just waiting for the old cogs in my head to align and come up with the solution :)

Meanwhile I've been reading some stories from the new Michael Marshall Smith collection (More Tomorrow and Other Stories), which have been entertaining so far, even if they are mostly grim tales. At some point I'll venture further into Robert Silverberg's Science Fiction 101 - this one has some great stories along with a dissection of each by the SF Grand Master himself!

I've also been feeding the Twilight Zone addiction and watching a few more episodes each night. Great stuff!

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2004 Stats:

2004 Word count:	9,201
Stories written:	2
Total submissions:	9
Total acceptances:	0
Total rejections:	8
Waiting for response:	3
Books read:	6
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	11