This week has been a flurry of activity writing-wise, with the completion of a new story and a concerted effort to get more submissions out there (currently 7 doing the rounds).

The new story, entitled Keeping Time, is around 3000 words and came out much as I'd envisioned. The problem is right now the plot doesn't have a lot of conflict, nor does the protagonist change from what he learns. This problem was also flagged in the first few critiques I've had of this piece, so it's something I'll want to address before I send it out. I'd say the experiment was reasonably successful anyway, but like always there's room for improvement :)

It has been a fairly quiet week otherwise. On Monday I had a bout of food poisoning or a bad reaction to MSG (I'm not sure which), so I felt pretty ill all Monday night. I felt much better on Tuesday though.

This weekend our mower died, and I wasn't able to get it going again despite pulling bits off and tinkering. This looks like a job for someone with a bit more mechanical aptitude methinks ;) We played mini-golf, washed the car, and watched a few movies, including Highlander (that is so 80s, but reasonably entertaining I suppose) and The Manchurian Candidate; the original 60s version (very strange movie, that). On the subject of movies, we watched that Michael Keaton movie, White Noise, on PPV last weekend, and it wasn't as scary as we'd expected from the trailers. It was more of a supernatural suspense movie. It was mildy creepy at times, but it was difficult to suspend disbelief when there were some rather large plot-holes and cheesy CGI near the end. Oh, well--at least we didn't see it at the theatre!

This week I hope to get cracking on some new stories, one of which I'm planning to submit to a forthcoming anthology. I reckon there'll be some tough competition, but I'd never get anything written if I worried about that all the time :) As usual there has been precious little time left for reading!

2005 Stats:

2005 Word count:	26,104
Stories written:	5
Total submissions:	24
Total acceptances:	0
Total rejections:	16
Waiting for response:	7
Books read:	7
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	8
Audiobooks:	15