Ho hum. Another enormous break since the last journal entry. I blame the ongoing, low-level illness, lots and lots to do, and, er, laziness mainly.

So, once again I am revising The Sleepers. It's funny how many times you can think a novel is ready, then when you read it a month or two later it just seems like a complete mess. This time I realised that the middle section, about 40 pages in Times New Roman, only involves people wandering around aimlessly and arguing. Urgh. So, I've ripped it out and rewritten it. The book is now too long, so I'm trimming. Redoing the middle of a novel is tough, if you want to do it without significantly changing the beginning or end. But then, all revision is hard. I like first drafts. First drafts are fun.

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Some nice news:

Via Gwenda I found out that my Strange Horizons story, A Field Guide to Ugly Places has made the storySouth list of notable short stories of 2005. Thanks for the link, Gwenda.

The table of contents for The Year's Best Fantasy #6, which includes my story Crab Apple, was published in February:

Eating Hearts · Yoon Ha Lee
The Denial · Bruce Sterling
The Fraud · Esther Friesner
Sunbird · Neil Gaiman
Shard of Glass · Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Farmer’s Cat · Jeff Vandermeer
Crab Apple · Patrick Samphire
The Comber · Gene Wolfe
Walpurgis Afternoon · Delia Sherman
Monster · Kelly Link
Robots and Falling Hearts · Tim Pratt & Greg van Eekhout
Still Life with Boobs · Ann Harris
Heads Up, Thumbs Down · Gavin J. Grant
Newbie Wrangler · Timothy J. Anderson
Being Here · Claude Lalumière
Mom and Mother Theresa · Candas Jane Dorsey
The Imago Sequence · Laird Barron
Magic in a Certain Slant of Light · Deborah Coates
Single White Farmhouse · Heather Shaw
Read It in the Headlines! · Garth Nix
Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane · Jonathon Sullivan
Mortegarde · Liz Williams
Inside Job · Connie Willis

Very cool company.

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Reasons we like Bristol no. 1:

Free wi-fi in all the cafes. Leeds is too out-of-date for that. We're sitting in the cafe now, supposedly writing. Except we have to go as the parking meter runs out in 9 minutes and I don't want a ticket.