It's been almost a year and a half since my last blog entry, there's been a lot of keeping on keeping on, and some dark times.

Well that was a bit of a dark patch. Just about all the way through this latest relapse, though it does seem that my left leg isn't going to get back all its function and I will need to carry a cane from now on (I can walk, but if I stay on my feet for more than 15 minutes my leg gets very tired and difficult to move).

I've finally reached the end of Stevie's Tuesday, and it only took 6000 words - eek - I'm too tired to go through final checks tonight so I'll post it in the morning.

I have written nothing this week and have no real excuse for not continuing Stevie's adventures.

I've just come back from a long weekend in my home village, and my best intentions of writing the next few parts of OHOP went by the board very early on. I'm not sure why I couldn't write in my mother's house - a little guilt perhaps for the mother character in the serial, or possibly just another case of me compartmentalising my life... I write in Hampshire, I don't in Wales.

Has anyone else been following the spat between Times food critic Giles Coren and the paper's subeditors? Highly entertaining stuff, tho not for the faint hearted, as Mr Coren's opinion are rather pithy.

A good summation from the Guardian here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/25/pressandpublishi...

I've coped with a fair bit over the last six years of health troubles, so why have just spent the last half hour sitting in my living room crying my eyes out. My left arm was paralysed for more than month, cramps in my hands bend and twist my fingers and I've no control over them, even the drag in my leg that means using a cane to walk, so why does not being able to go to the toilet upset me so much? Everything the doctor has prescribed has had a minor immediate but temporary benefit, and then added added another problem.

There'll not be an episode of OHOP this evening, as I'm a tad rough. There was a certain room in the flat I hadn't visited since Thursday (first time experience for me), and my GP provided a very thorough remedy... I'm not feeling very creative right now :)

The last competition entry of the year went in the post yesterday so I'm free to write fiction (I'm poetried out for a few months - I don't write long works but the distillation process is very draining).

It's that time of year again, when there are quite a few poetry competitions for Anglos like me. I've not entered any for the last couple of years after being placed in one, and getting outed as a poet in work (definitely non-U in an IT department). I have a few to get ready, a fairly painstaking process, so no new fiction for a couple of weeks at least.

China has, eventually, begun to appear on my shelves, although it's somewhat different from what I started searching for more than a month ago. It didn't take too long to discover that I have an innate expensive taste in porcelain, the imari patterns I was most attracted to were art nouveau Derby pieces, beautiful but impractical for use.

I've spent the last fortnight alternating between the throes of nicotine deprivation and guilt from succumbing to it - I am too weak.

I've written nothing, though I've had a few new ideas, and earlier this week I - accidentally - half sold the idea of 'Midnight Angels' to one of the commissioning editors in work - like I need the pressure!

Another meander through the trivia of my life, but then I don't really worry too much about the big stuff.

The town where I live was expanded from a small market town during the nineteen sixties, spreading out into the surrounding countryside. As the newly developed areas were built on greenfield sites finding street names has been something of a problem - one area has streets named for composers, another for islands and another for Roman emperors!

I'm writing an SF story set in the near future, but written in the past tense (if that makes sense). The problem is, although not written in the first person, the 'author' must be in the future to write in the past tense, but some of the things written about would/will still be the same when the 'author' is writing, so should they be referred to in the present tense?