Easter weekend, and a long holiday. The first chance I've had for a while to update the website properly. I've put up a couple of old journal entries that have been sitting on my hard drive for a long time waiting to rise into the ether. I've also updated the bio and sundry other pages, adding reviews to the "Dawn, by the Light of a Barrow Fire" and "Love Stories from the Jungle" pages. The reason I've been so busy recently is that I've been working really hard to get my novel finished and that I've started a new job. The novel, Water Ways, Iron Roads, is about 150,000 words long, and I wrote the last 100,000 words in a bit under four months. Bearing in mind that it took me far nearly a year to do the first 50,000 words this was pretty impressive (to me, anyway). I finally got a grip on the story and it flowed wonderfully. In fact, I was incredibly sad to finish it. I would quite happily have kept on going for a lot longer (for the first time in my life, I am beginning to understand Robert Jordan's head). However, a story needs to finished. I have no sympathy for novels that never end. A story should be complete. The end is perhaps the hardest part, but that's no excuse to just keep writing it forever. So I finished it, and after a short break have started on a children's novel, tentatively called "The Winter of the Earth".

I started work at Leeds University three weeks ago and am enjoying the job. It is vastly more satisfying than temping from post to post. The job has a lot of variety and keeps me interested all day, which is very unusual. I've heard it said that a writer should take a dull job so that the writer can keep his/her imagination and creative energy for his/her writing endeavours. What a load of crap. A dull job destroys your mind, almost as fast as television does. Imagination and creative energy are not rationed quantities that you run out of if you use them at work. On the contrary, they grow when they are used. That's why you get ideas for stories when you write. That's why the writer who waits for inspiration waits forever.

Steph and I moved to Leeds just over two months ago. Steph is at university here; her department is about a hundred yards from where I work. Our house is about 45 minutes away from the university by buses. We are 5 or 10 minutes away from a big park where we can walk Nika. All in all, this is a pretty decent place to live. (The disadvantages are that parts of the neighbourhood aren't so great, and relying on public transport limits where we can go and when. And we're renting the house, with all the problems that rented houses provide.) But we're happy here.

This year, so far, I've sold three short stories. Five Things of Beauty, a very short story I wrote in a couple of days over Christmas went to Strange Horizons. Finisterre, a story I wrote in Vienna last year went to The Third Alternative. And A Veil, a Meal, and Dust a story I wrote in Week 2 of Clarion West, and which languished for almost a year at a market that then collapsed before I could get a response out of them, went to Ideomancer, who had previously bought my Week 1 Clarion West story, Love Stories from the Jungle. Meanwhile, Steph has been working on writing children's novels, and has now completed three of them, and is working on a fourth. She started to market them last week, which has been an interesting experience for both of us, as neither of us has tried to market a novel before.

Happy Easter