Steph's been away for the last few days in Oxford, attending a conference (British society for 18th century studies) and giving a paper. Nika and I have been moping and waiting for her to come back. We never manage much when she's away. Watched Underworld on Thursday night to fill the void (sigh). It was fun, if a bit stupid. A shame it didn't make a bit more sense. Post-Buffy, movies with vampires in need to be better than that, though. One big complaint, which applies to just about every movie I've seen with werewolves in recently: does no one in Hollywood have any idea what a wolf looks like? The things that appear as werewolves in all of these movies bear no relationship at all to the appearance of real wolves. Wolves are beautiful, elegant things. Werewolves in movies are randomly ugly (usually black) creatures.

Talking about wolves, we bought a wolf calendar a few days ago. The photos are incredible. Last year we had a wolf calendar with random wolf facts for every month. Just about every one of those facts applied equally to Nika. This may well be why we like wolf calendars.

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I sent the (for now) final draft of Touching Ice to my agent (it is so cool to type that...) yesterday. She'll be sending it to the first publisher very soon. It's both exciting and totally unreal. I've been wanting to have a book published since I was 14, which is almost 20 years ago now. It could well happen in the next couple of years. Short story publications are great, but a novel publication just seems like the big boys' game, not something I'd ever really expected to play. Wanted, yes, expected, no. Until it happens it'll feel just as ethereal, I think. I don't think I'll believe it until I hold a copy of my own novel in my hands.

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Of course, when that's happened, the question is, what next? Having a novel published has been the goal for so long, when it happens (if) then what next? When your life goal is met, what then? Of course, I want more novels published. I want success, money, fame, groupies. But those weren't life goals. Steph was talking about this with a friend of ours who is a published novelist. You need to redefine so much of what you always needed that you're in danger of losing direction. Perhaps the easiest thing is not to believe you've achieved it, no matter what the evidence.

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The weather has been incredibly awful over the last few days--gales and rain. Nika refused to go out in the rain for more than a few minutes, and I was too soft to make her. We had it lucky, though. In Northumberland, which can't be much more than 100-150 miles away, they had massive floods, so our weather seems quite tame. Nonetheless, last night I thought our roof might blow off. There were a few trees and advertising hoardings down today. It's much better now though. I attribute it to Steph's benign influence moving north.

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We've been having trouble getting ourselves back into a writing routine after the Christmas break. We always used the discipline of one hour a day at a cafe before work to make ourselves write, but we've lost that routine (we gave up because of the awful, cheesey 50's Christmas songs they played on repeat - hello Mr Sinatra, you were awful...). Steph's being away hasn't helped. We both made a new year's resolution to write at least one sentence a day every day this year. Trouble is, most days that's all we've managed so far this year. 365 sentences in 2005 won't be terribly impressive.

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Incidentally, if you search on google for 'photos of pasta' (no quotation marks), Steph's journal comes up second on the list. This may be a disappointment. There are no photos of pasta on Steph's journal.