Got back yesterday from a weekend away at my mother's house just outside Bristol. We seem to have been blessed with a second summer these last few days, so I spent all Saturday lying in the garden, reading my George R.R. Martin books while Steph went off to a musicology conference in Cardiff. We don't have a garden here, so I haven't really been able to do it most of the year. I suppose I should have been writing, but what the Hell.

The only sad thing was that we had to put our dog, Nika, in a kennel for the weekend. She really hates that. She was a street dog and she still worries about losing her home, I think. We got her back today. She was so excited. Now she's lying asleep on the couch behind me. I doubt she really slept all weekend. Having her back makes the house feel complete again. I was forever turning around and not seeing her when she was away.

I've almost been productive this evening. I've sent off a couple of critiques I had been owing for far too long. Maybe tomorrow I'll even get down to writing something new. I think I have an angle on how I can write one of my current works in progress (The Cold Folk), so I'll give that a go. I've also sent my most recent short story, The Green Pit, to my critique group. This is a group formed by my Clarion West class. We're not terribly active as most of us have been writing novels, but there seems a burst of short story writing going on at the moment.

Our Clarion West class has been pretty productive over the last couple of years. We've sold stories to almost every professional spec fic market except SciFiction and Analog and there has been some particularly impressive writing, not all of which has seen publication yet. Maybe I'll put up a webpage of our publications at some point. That should help me procrastinate for another day or two.