After going on about how blackberry season marks the end of summer for us in England, we've suddenly been hit by another summer. We've had some of the best weather all summer this last week, and it looks set for a few more days. This is pretty unusual for England; September is never very hot. It's that slow transition we have between summer and autumn. Just shows how screwed up the climate is these days, I guess.

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Looks like my Realms of Fantasy story, Crab Apple, didn't come out in the October issue after all. This is good, in some ways, because I was wondering why I hadn't had any contributor copies. Hopefully it'll be in the December issue. I'd like to see it published this year, although I guess it doesn't particularly matter.

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It's a nice quiet time at work so I'm finally forcing myself to get down and learn PHP and MySQL like I've been meaning to for months. I don't really have any excuse not to, now that we've employed a minion--sorry, support officer--who is taking on some of my less stimulating work. Actually, I'm fairly keen to get on with it so I can start remodeling the work website, which is a terrible, ugly, unwieldy, old monster of a site. It's going to be a pretty enormous job, though, and I'm hoping I can manage it because all this PHP and MySQL stuff is fairly alien to me and the new site is going to be mega-complicated.

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Progress on the new novel is slow. I've very nearly reached the end of the set-up phase. Set up is fun and easy to write. You get to put in all the cool stuff you like. After that, though, you have to make it all evolve and come together. That stuff is hard. Time for some plotting, I think.