I've been um-ing and ah-ing about whether to start a journal. I'm British and so I'm terribly self-conscious about talking about myself, which is not a good way of going about journaling. On the other hand, I'm prone to rant about things that get my goat. My partner is very good about this. She tells me she doesn't get fed up with it at all, and I believe her. But how much more effective and fulfilling to rant to the empty vacuums of cyberspace, to send electrons spinning down wires, to realign magnetic domains in hard discs on servers around the world. It is the high-tech equivalent of shouting at the radio or television (something I also do). I don't intend to do this every day, or even every week, but I'll update this now and again.

So, here goes. I'll start with a "Where am I now?"

Until a month or so ago I was living in Austria. My partner, Stephanie, and I met last year (2001) at Clarion West writer's workshop. She is American and I am English. We decided to move in together, and as she had always wanted to come to England to study at university, we decided that she would do a PhD here. Immigration restrictions being what they are, any other alternative would be enormously difficult, if not impossible. However, Steph also has a dog, a very sweet Border collie mix called Nika. We both decided that it would be inconceivable to leave Nika behind, but it was equally inconceivable to make her go through the appalling British quarantine system. There is a loophole, however. Animals can enter Britain without quarantine if they have spent at least the previous six months in a European Union country. Austria was the easiest choice. Steph is pretty good at German and she's lived in Vienna before. I'm pretty bad at German but I know a few words. So we went there.

Now I'm back in England and am going through the long process of trying to find a job. I've applied to a couple of jobs in the last few days, one in Manchester, which is an outside chance at best, and one in Sheffield for which I still have only a slightly better chance. The Sheffield one is one I would quite like. It's something called a Widening Participation Officer. Basically it involves persuading students from deprived backgrounds to go to university. I think that is an unalloyed goodTM thing. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people consider this a good thing and there are always lots of applications for this type of job. We'll see.

On the writing front, I'm now on Chapter 10 of my novel, Water Ways, Iron Roads, and probably about 48,000 words in. At the end of this chapter I'll be at the end of part one of the story. There are supposed to be three parts to this, so I may be in the process of perpetrating a fat fantasy. We'll see. The plot details are a little hazy for the next couple of sections. No new short stories recently. I got a rejection from Strange Horizons for a story (The Tower) that I didn't really think was their type of story. Still, they are quick to respond and take email submissions so I didn't think there was anything to lose. I want to send this story to 3SF, the new British magazine, but I have another story there at the moment and 3SF have unpredictable response times. I have six other stories out, one at a market that is probably dead, a couple of others at really slow markets. Three of my stories I really think are good ones and I'm determined to find homes for them somewhere.