My poor journal is once again feeling neglected. I feel I probably have some excuses for this (lots of writing, going away, work, and so on), but it's still giving me sad looks. So, some updates.

I'm having a nice little writing slump having finished another short story and not having an idea to work on at the moment. Well, I have some fragments of ideas, but none of them grab me enough right now. I'm putting off working on another novel because I don't want a bunch of unsold novels sitting around. Marketing a novel takes so damned long that you either have to abandon older ones or not write new ones, at least if you don't have an agent or publisher. Anyway, I'd like to get a few more short story publications out there in the hope of increasing my chances at novel publication. Don't know if it works that way. It probably doesn't.

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The royal mail have, as part of their commitment to customer service, apparently, decided to stop delivering mail at 9 in the morning and to deliver it between 11.30 and noon. This drives me mad. I want to know if anyone has written to me by 9, damn it. At the same time, they're closing down all the post offices, so to get a stamp we have to queue for at least ten minutes in the one remaining post office in Leeds. Maybe they're just getting fed up with having to deal with letters all the time.

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Steph has a cool new digital camera. We've spent much time taking random photographs. Admittedly, most of these have been of Nika, as she's far more photogenic than either of us. I'll put some online this evening. I can't imagine why we waited so long to get a digital camera (well, apart from the fact that we couldn't afford one). Now all we need are iPods to make our lives complete.

Now listening to: Face in the Sand, Iron Maiden - Not really sure what this song is about, but I like it nonetheless.

Now reading: Daughter of the Empire, Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts - I read this a long time ago, right when it first came out, and I thought it was great at the time. I've returned to it with some trepidation, and I think I was partially right to. On a sentence level, this is pretty poor stuff. But they do tell an involving story. It's not an old debate in spec fic, style versus story, and these two jump in on the story side, but I nearly gave up on the first page because of it. If only they could produce fun stories with great writing too.