The results of the Strange Horizons readers' poll have been announced. Winner in the short story category was Greg van Eekhout for In the Late December. This story made my Best of Year list, and it was certainly the best thing I read in Strange Horizons last year. A well-deserved winner.

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I've so much to do at work that I've totally frozen up. My senior colleague is on holiday, another colleague is leaving on Thursday, so I will be taking on her work as well as my own, and it's the time of year when I have to do financial projections for the next year and five years. On top of that, I'm late with the newsletter I have to produce. Bah.

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On the plus side, writing is going well and steadily. One advantage of writing a novel or two is that you build up a library of short story ideas that you can't do anything with until you've finished the novel. Then when you finish it, they're sitting there waiting to be written.

I finished the medieval fantasy about 3 days ago. It came out as just over 8,000 words. I'm now about 3,000 words into a World War I story. Hopefully, that'll be done by Easter. After that, I've got a couple more ideas to write out. Then I should revise some of my first drafts and send them out. It should all keep me busy for a month or so.

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I've been entertaining myself by designing Steph a new website. It's not live yet, but should be in a couple of days if she likes it. In part it's practice as one of the jobs I'm going to be taking over is the School of Education webmaster. To be honest, my web skills are back in the dark ages, so I'm giving myself a crash course. I know I'm going to have to redesign the School of Education site from scratch at some point soon, and it's an enormous site. I'll be making it dynamic, but before I can do that, I need to learn something like PHP. No doubt I'll find time to do that in between doing two people's jobs. Bah, I say.

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It's sunny outside. I wish I could be out there. I'm not. I'm not going anywhere for some hours.