The wanderer returns . . .

Not that I've actually been a-wandering, as such, but I've had too much on my plate to ponce about updating my blog.

The extensions lumbers on. As of today the electrics are in place (courtesy of Uncle Al), and so now I'm waiting for Graham the Plasterer. Hopefully he'll be here next week. The temperature has dropped and we're all freezing. No radiators and whopping great gaps in the ceiling. Oh, and the ready money is running out.

On the writing front I've finished 'The Devil's Fauna', but will run it through Critters before I send it off anywhere. 'Raising Archie' has reached the final selection stage at ASIM magazine (hurrah!). 'The Emigrant' has been rejected twice more (boo hiss!) since FARTHING said no. BRUTARIAN wished me luck with my fine story as they passed over it -- in one day! And TTA rejected it after a week. I've just emailed it to DARK DISCOVERIES.

I feel really, really tired tonight.

Rejection time again

Got another story rejection yesterday. 'The Emigrant' will not be published in the new magazine FARTHING then. I never let my hopes get too high, so when a story is rejected I'm not too disappointed. Disappointed, yes, but not too disappointed. Gary Fry at FUSING HORIZONS has already told me that he will gladly take 'The Emigrant' and another story called 'Sheep' for publication. But, I dunno, I was rather hoping to sell 'The Emigrant' to a more professional market . . .

I am a bit confused about what constitutes a good sale. I've seen writers with serious credentials let stories go to non-paying markets, something I've resisted doing so far. But then, some of my "sales" have been to markets where the pay has only been equal to the cover price of the book or magazine. Does that really count as a sale? FUSING HORIZONS is one such market. But FH is quite highly regarded in the small press and attracts good writers. So what to do? Perhaps I should send these two stories to Gary at FH and be glad to see them published?

I wrote a short, short story last night. 'Pretty Useless Says'. It took me rather by surprise as it isn't even one of the ideas that has been nudging me for these past few weeks. 900 words and finished in about 1.5 hours. But I shall probably spend another 20 hours polishing it!

All work and no play

Spent most of the weekend digging up Dad's drive so he can have it widened in readiness for his new motorhome. This, combined with helping Syd the Builder concrete the floor of the extension and the daily 6 to 3 grind has left me bloody knackered. S'odd, really, but being physically knackered has left me too drained to sit down and write. Which is a bit frustrating really as I have at least three good ideas to nail, and another story - 'The Uinta Incident' - to expand.

Reading 'Last Breath' by Peter Stark. Excellent book. It charts the body and mind as the last breaths are taken, more often than not by sportsmen and women pursuing extremes in human endurance. I bought it for a quid in Llandudno and that act of spontaneous fiscal abandon has been amply rewarded. Like . . . Did you know that more people die every year of attacks by moose than sharks? Shark attacks only account for 8 deaths a year while Bullwinkle kills 9, the horrid beast. 4 people a year are killed by mustelids, usually pet ferrets killing unguarded infants. Snakes top the list with 9000 deaths a year. Although this pales into insignificance when compared to the 1,000, 000 human deaths a year attributable to homo sapiens. And did you know that in the 1920s they injected malaria into syphilus patients' frontal lobes as the resulting malarial fever cooked and killed the syphilus? Yeah, I know, you really needed to know that, right?

Jill's got tonsilitis. Again. This is the 4th time this year. Like bloomin' great golf balls wedged in the back of her throat, they are. Surely they'll be taken out soon, despite our GP's assertion that they're best left alone. She sees a specialist in a little over a month.

Hosin' Down

Up for work at 5 am (yes there are two 5 o'clocks in the day) as is the norm for a Friday. The upside of this is that I finish work at 12.30. Nice!

Kinda pleasant walking work at this time of year. It's Winter that gets me down. Dark mornings mean stepping in dog turds, tripping over kerbs and bumping into awkwardly parked cars. What I do is memorise the locations of all the dog turds on the way home, when it's light, so I can try and avoid them the following morning when it's dark. My mate Russ enquired whether this meant I had a shit memory. Haha, such a wag is Russ. Last year I walked into a Gas sub-station. Yup, a bloody great building that's been there ever since God knows when. I misjudged the distance it takes me to walk round it and smacked my head on it. Split skin, trickle of blood, bruised ego. How my workmates laughed to see such fun, sympathetic souls that they are.

But light mornings are cheery things to be appreciated while they last.

Helped Syd the Builder concrete the floor of the extension. Heather wanted to help cleaning up. I passed her the hosepipe on condition she behaved. "Spray the floor, not me, okay?"

"Yes, Dad."

"Promise?"

"Yes, Dad."

"Good girl."

. . . She soaked me, of course.

Bless.

Rankin

Finished reading 'Knees Up Mother Earth' by Robert Rankin. Silly, silly, silly: I enjoyed it enormously. This is the 8th book in the Brentford Trilogy, and borrows heavily from all the previous books in the Rankin canon. All the usual running gags about old charters, traditions, or something, electric miniguns, Runeology, and some bizarre continuity are all in place. And yet again Pooley and Omally save the world from Armageddon. My only gripe really is that with all the mystical duelling that takes place between the white magickers and black magickers, things are only really settled by several pounds of Semtex. But it's a small gripe, and I look forward to the next Brentford book, 'The Brightonomicon'. (Rankin lives in Brighton now, not Brentford!) Rankin's Brentford reminds me of 'The League of Gentlemen' and Royce Vasey. There's the same kind of tweedy black humour and grotesque characters. Wonder if the writers of LoG have read Rankin, or whether it's just convergent evolution? Garn, I'm just showing off now, chucking out terms like covergent evolution, like I know what I'm talking about.

Here Comes the Sun

"The sun has got his hat on . . ." And so have I, and there's little hip-hip-hooray about it. Thanks to the retinitis pigmentosa the glare from a bright sun is almost unbearable nowadays, so I'm reduced to a baseball cap and a pair of dense black wraparound shades. On someone else (read a 'younger someone else') they might look cool, but on me I suspect the shades and cap ensemble looks a bit desperate. Like a man in the throes of a middle-age crisis. Not so, I cry. I'm just blind as a bat!

Syd the Builder (no relation to Bob) is well under way now with the extension to the bungalow. The back garden is a veritable building site, festooned with all manner of bricky detritus. I tell myself it will all be worthwhile, and that it'll be all over by Christmas.

Beards

Today I shaved off my beard. It had 'decorated' my face for about a month. 4 weeks of looking in the mirror to see if it had grown any since I'd last checked (about thirty seconds before) and kinda half-closing my eyes in an effort to see what it would look like when it filled out a bit. It itched a bit, collected crumbs, and probably looked more Dick than Van Dyke. The final kicker was when I asked Jill if she liked it. She said no, so my little experiment as an alpha-male was scuppered by the Wee Wifie. Heather, our four year old daughter was thoroughly annoyed as she loved the rugged look adopted by Daddy and chastised Mummy, telling her "No more housework for a whole week!"

Jill took Heather into a public toilet yesterday. The sinks were full of vomit. This is probably the downside of equality or something, I don't know. My little girl looked at said sink bowls and quipped "Well, I wouldn't want to wash my underwear in that!"

No, I don't quite undertand it either.