You remember those old black-and white-horror / science fiction movies. The ones where the hero finds out that everyone else has, overnight, either died or turned into a mindless zombie. Well, applying for a job is a bit like one of those movies. You spend hours upon hours squeezing your brains out of your eyeballs as you try to make your application as positive and as relevant as possible without actually lying (I know some people simply lie on their applications; that would be easier, but my parents were misguided enough to make me grow up honest) and then you send them out. And then ... you hear nothing. Nothing. Ever. Look, I've done I don't know how many of the blasted things. I know I'm qualified for these jobs. I know I could do them and do them well. But still I hear nothing. And I can only come to one conclusion. There is nobody out there. All of the people looking at job applications have either died or become mindless zombies. There can be no other explanation for that vacuum-like silence.

I'd almost forgotten about this in all the excitement of ... er ... all the excitement, but on 24th November I finally finished part 1 of my novel, Water Ways, Iron Roads. Part 1 weighs in at 50,171 words, or 216 typed A4 pages. It's taken me an ungodly amount of time to get this far and there are still two more parts to go. The first part is also very poor in many ways. The writing of the early chapters is not as good as I would expect of myself. I have plenty of excuses, of course. This is my first novel, other than an abomination I fathered as a teenager, and several attempts that dribbled away to nothingness after a few chapters, and writing a novel is very, very different to writing a short story. Also, it's still first draft. And I've got a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side. But even with the problems, I pretty proud about this story. The characters are starting to come into focus (at last), I know where I'm going in the next two sections, and, God help me, I've come up with an idea for a sequel/prequel (an idea which requires me not to kill some of the characters I once intended to kill. But that may be a good thing; I've been chastised before for killing off my characters too frequently). The whole first part is now sitting printed out in a large file above my computer, and I feel smug about the whole thing. I am now trying not to think about how unusual it is for a first novel to get published and how I've still got about 80,000 words left to write, and then I have to revise the whole thing. Oh, God....

[rant]Last week was a sad week for my poor old car, Albert. If you read the last entry in this journal, you will recall that Albert was stolen from a car park and that he was found again, but that I was being charged a hefty fee for the privilege of having him stolen. So, out I went to find these people who had recovered Albert from the street. They had told me that there was no reported damage, so I was hoping to get him back. Well, when I got there I discovered that "no-damage" in fact meant a busted back axle and that there was no way Albert could be driven. They would, however, for not much more than a hundred pounds (on top of the one hundred and something pounds I apparently owed them), tow him back to my place where I could get him repaired for God knows how much extra. Albert was insured, but that was under my brother's name. If we had claimed, we would have got the money back plus a nominal sum to write him off (they valued Albert at £200 last year - he was an old car, although he had never broken down), but my brother, Martin, would have lost his "no-claims bonus", which gives him a couple of hundred pounds per year off his own insurance, so in the long term it would have been a waste. Sadly, then, I decided to let Albert move on to a better place and to allow his organs to be used by other hurting cars. Albert has now been scrapped (a process that cost me an additional £50+). I am left with no car and a bill for about £170. And I'm also left with wondering who has robbed me more. The theives took my car, but I can get by without a car, just about, but the recovery company (sub-contracted by the police) have stolen £170 from me (I do consider it stealing: I didn't ask them to pick up my car when the police found it, and I had no choice to get them to scrap it as I had no way of getting the car to a scrap dealer myself, at least not straight away, and my bill was going up by £12 a day just to have the car sitting in the recovery company's yard.) I was tempted to tell them that I had no intention of paying, that they appeared to have taken my car without permission, and that they did not have my permission to have taken it from where they found it. But that one would have been a loser, I'm sure. The whole thing is topped off by the fact that the police did not even make a pretence of investigating the theft. In fact, they appear to have been involved at no stage (other than possibly finding the car dumped). They did not contact me. They did not ask any questions. They did not look at the CCTV footage of the car park (there was, I have since discovered, a CCTV camera right next to where my car was parked). Apparently, the police do not investigate car theft, at least not of old cars. So there's a hint for anyone looking to turn to a life of crime: you can get away with stealing cars in England. The police just don't care.

And if you do get your car stolen, don't make the mistake of reporting it, because you will be the one who ends up paying for it, twice over.[/rant]