I just found out that someone has nominated my story, The Western Front, for the British Science Fiction Association Awards. This is very cool stuff. I suspect that, say, Michaels Swanwick and Resnick are by now fairly sanguine about award nominations, but for those of us to whom it happens less frequently, it's exciting and very pleasing that someone likes one of your stories enough to nominate it for an award. So, thanks to the anonymous person(s) who nominated The Western Front.

For everyone else, as I'm feeling happy, you can read The Western Front free online. It first appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of The Third Alternative, which isn't so easy to get hold of now.

I've also tweaked my website to make the list of other online stories more obvious. What do you think?

#
Steph and I met up at lunchtime today to go to the German Christmas market in town. We were a little disappointed, because it was only half the size of last year, and last year was smaller than the year before, but we still drank warm glühwein and Steph ate stollen cake and we avoided making the obvious joke we (and everyone else) make every year. We wandered around,bought neat Christmas ornaments and tried to imagine we were back in Vienna.

#
I figured out a new opening to the new-ish novel that has been stalling me for ages. It's working title is Secrets, but I'm looking for something a bit cooler. Now that I've managed to start writing it, I'm getting ideas for other books, too. It really is true that the only way to come up with ideas is to write.

#
I also put up a page for my December 2005 Realms of Fantasy story, Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green, including an extract that doesn't have the stupid what-do-we-need-paragraph-breaks-for formatting that Realms put in to make the beginning of the story so awkward to read. If that's not enough to sell it to you, you can just look at a (large) thumbnail of Melissa Ferreira's gorgeous artwork that accompanies the story