Contributing to the meme

Four jobs you've had in your life: Airbrushing ceramic horses. Barman. graphic designer. Writer.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Highlander. Bladerunner. Shaun of the Dead. Pulp Fiction

Four places you've lived: Dundee, Scotland. Waterfall, South Africa. Hammersdale, South Africa. Hillcrest, South Africa.

Four TV shows you love to watch: The Daily Show. The Simpsons. 24. House.

Four places you've been on vacation: Scotland. Cape Town. Jo'burg. Drakensberg mountains.

Four websites you visit daily: Dark Horizons. Worlds of D&D. My ADSL (South African consumerism website where one can vent bile about Telkom, our "wonderful" telecoms company that is holding back the growth of the country with its monopoly.) Warren Ellis.

Four of your favorite foods: Pizza. Steak. Chicken breast with a mushroom and bacon sauce. Hot chips fried to perfection. (Nice and crispy.)

Four places you'd rather be: Nowhere.

Belly full of turkey

Merry Christmas everyone.

The first round of xmas visiting is over. We visited Caroline's parents for lunch. Isabella is 7 months old now and hasn't quite got the hang of this present thing. All she wanted to do was eat the paper. Wish I'd known that beforehand. Would have saved a lot of money.

I was utterly spoiled this year. Caroline got me a 19" lcd monitor. It's a thing of beauty and I now have space on my small desk again. (Writer's note: I can now fit two pages on the screen as I write and the font is big enough to read. This makes me happy.) I'm making the most of it as next year is going to be all about Isabella. She'll be almost two and will no doubt be asking for her own presents by then.

Tomorrow: we visit my parents and do it all again.

Some of the stupid things politicians have said in 2005, courtesy of Global News Matrix website. Link.

I've set up a link to a feedburner account, in case anyone wants to subscribe to a feed instead of having to check in to see if anything is new. Just click on the xml button in the links section to the right.

I got a few notes back on a proposal currently awaiting a nod or a shoot-down from a well-known games publisher. The changes the editor requested make the story much stronger and make me kinda wish I'd thought of them first. Will rework the synopsis and send it back. Hopefully I'll hear back in January sometime.

On the original novel front, I've been stuck on the same chapter for a couple of weeks now. It's driving me mad. It's a "revelation" chapter, where things are finally made clear to the characters and they have to reevaluate their reasons for being there. I think I've found a cool way to make the supporting characters stick with the main character, one that won't compromise their own personalities. Once I get this chapter done it's officially at the halfway point. (Again. I had already written 100k in this story, but then ripped out 40k as it wasn't working. The characters were acting stupid, the writing was crap, the chapters were not flowing. It was a really hard decision to make, but I'm much happier with the direction now. Word count currently stands at about 70k.

Stalin and his pesky monkey warriors

So I finally decided to put a website together for myself. The final kick in the behind came when John Joseph Adams did an informal poll of writers in their twenties, and I realized I was one of the very few not to have any type of online presence.

So here it is. For good or for bad. Hi to everyone who knows me, and a hey there to those that don't. Hope you'll come back.

In the meantime, for those of you who are still searching for that perfect gift, here you go. No, don't thank me. I consider it my duty to point these things out to you.

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