I'm sitting under a tree. It still has all its leaves, every one of them perfect yellow against the bright blue sky. The other trees around have lost their leaves, and fifty yards away, a man is vacuuming up the leaves, like an incarnation of futility. Every couple of minutes he has to go and enter his sack. On his back is a juddering, diesel-fueled monster of a machine, roaring at the leaves. A minute later, the wind has blown more leaves onto the path.

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Yesterday, the local priest came around to visit. He turned out to be a nice guy and pretty interesting. We talked about books and films and history, and he went away with our copy of The Two Towers DVD. Talking about The Two Towers, the extended version is due out on 18th November, just 11 days away. Steph and I carefully put that in our budget for this month (yes, we budget--the sad side-effects of me being an administrator and us never having enough money). We can't wait. 42 minutes of extra movie and two full discs of extras. We won't be moving for a couple of days.

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Steph sold a story to Tim Pratt's new magazine Flytrap today. It sounds like an interesting project, one of those breed of recent magazines like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet that publish very high quality fiction by hot new writers and cool established writers but which don't aim for mass circulation. In some ways, I suspect that this is the future of genre short-fiction publishing. The days of the magazines with readers in the hundreds of thousands are long gone, but the need for publications for new writers to develop their skills has not. This is certainly a magazine I'll be watching and submitting to when I have something appropriate.