It's been a long time since I've done a journal entry. A very long time. Okay, I'm not the most reliable journaler out there. Neil Gaiman is not exactly looking over his shoulder, worrying that I'm about to overtake him. But these last few weeks have been particularly bad.

But I have excuses! Several of them. Or a couple, at least.

Here we go:

Way back this year, I mistakenly volunteered to take on a project at work: rebuilding their ugly, hulking, enormous, static website and relaunching it as a clean, sleek, dynamic site. The idea was that I'd replace the 600+ clunky plain-html, tables-based-layout pages with nice, modern new ones. I'd write a content management system, design the layout based on CSS and renew all the content from scratch. All on top of my normal job.

This was not the cleverest idea. There's a reason companies charge plenty for this kind of thing: it's a lot of work. Particularly if, like me, you didn't know anything about the technologies involved.

Anyway, last Thursday was the date that I'd set to get the new site up. And I managed it. But it did involve lots of sleepless nights and long days, and much, much panic.

In the process, I learned: I'm not much of a designer; getting anyone to give you any information about anything at all is near-impossible; my computer is too old for this; I can dream about content management systems.

Anyway, while it's not completed, I did put the site up: here it is. I've got a lot of fiddling to do, particularly to make Internet Explorer display it properly.

That's my first excuse.

The second excuse is the one I've been using all summer: illness. Every time I've almost got over the virus that has been knocking me out, I've got over-tired and over-stressed and come down with it again.

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I've been making decisions about rationalising all the things I'd taken on. I've stopped doing Tangent reviews, because I wasn't keeping up and as a result I was just getting stressed. Reviewing should be fun, not a chore. And it had caused my own review journal to fall by the wayside. With my own journal, I can review when I have time. I was also going to be reviewing novels for the new Fantasy Magazine, but as they seemed to forget about it, I was pleased to let it go.

I'm considering reviewing both novels and short fiction on my review journal. The idea of it when I started was to help me look more closely at short fiction so I could write it better. Now I'm concentrating on novels, that reason seems less pressing.

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Steph and I have decided to take a long weekend in Edinburgh later this month to give us a break and to give us a chance to concentrate on our writing for a prolonged period. It should be awesome. Neither of us have ever been to Edinburgh, but everyone tells us it's wonderful.