It's a new month, so I suppose I ought to do a journal entry. Ah, the commitment.

I've started reviewing for the new, improved Tangent Online, which is taking rather more work than I had anticipated, particularly as I want to keep my own review journal going. So far I've done the April and May issues of F&SF and have the April/May double issue of Asimov's to do.

One of the things that used to bug me about the old Tangent Online was that too many of the reviews were no more than a paragraph of plot summary with no indication of the quality of the story or any discussion of the story. I'm trying to make sure that my reviews offer a bit more than that and it's fairly tough going. I now see the appeal of writing the plot summary review, but I also think it's a waste of time. As a result, my reviews tend to be, well, a little on the long side.

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There was an item in yesterday's Metro newspaper which was perhaps more surprising for its appearance (Metro is fairly right-wing) than for its content:

Migrants Refuse Handouts
"Only 17 of the 133,000 young Eastern European migrants with visas to work in Britain are on unemployment benefit and only four are on income support, figures show. The migrants, mainly under 34 and single, have jobs in the healthcare, hospitality and building trades which many Britons consider poorly paid. The Home Office said the migrants, mainly Poles and Lithuanians, 'contribute to economic success'. An influx of newcomers was expected when eight countries joined the EU last May but many were here already."

To put this item into context, when the EU enlarged, the right wing papers were full of alarmist headlines of how we were going to be "swamped" with a million immigrants all who would live of our generous (ha!) benefits system. Right now, the same newspapers and the right wing politicians (including the Conservative party) are campaigning in the general election on stopping or limiting immigration. I think the Metro story knocks a fairly big hole in their arguments.

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It's a f*cking windmill, Jim
Also in the same newspaper was a picture of a rather beautiful old windmill, accompanied by the following:

"Green Fuel: A 19th-century mill is leading the way in alternative fuel. Green's Windmill ... will now run on recycled chip oil."

Green fuel, huh? It's a f*cking windmill. What could be more green than running it on, well, wind.

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Just shoot me
So, yesterday evening was fun. I discovered that at some time in the past, round about last November, I had saved an old version of a five part story over the new part without realising it. Ever since, I've been marketing these five stories without bothering to look at them. Yesterday I realised that these were the first drafts, full of parentheses, XXXs instead of numbers, place holders and so on. I must have sent these to a dozen of the best markets. Now, I'm not claiming that the stories were rejected solely because of a few bits like that, but in the couple of times when they were rejected after much consideration with comments like "very close" it can't have helped. I spent the whole evening trying to rebuild the newer version of the story from an intermediate version.

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Which leads me nicely onto the news that my story The Western Front is coming out in the Spring edition of The Third Alternative, due in shops this month. The Western Front was one of the five stories mentioned above. I think that I sent it to Andy Cox before making a complete balls up of the file, but I won't know for sure until the magazine lands on my floor. Luckily, the only thing that was wrong with that particular story in the screwed up version was the ranks of soldiers and some of the technical military terms.

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And now, here comes the music.