A Submarine in my Coffee

Image: Submarinegear.com

Hell of a long couple of days, spent mostly in the darkness due to the fact I live in Scotland and it’s never daylight here at this time of year – not between the hours of 3pm and 9am, that is – and for the rest of the time one can barely sense the day lit world outside the office. Just your typical winter day in Scotland.

Sigh.

Catching Up With Work
I’m catching up with all my work: the Savvy workshop, the Ranfurly Review, emails and newsletters and a host of other stuff. Basically, I plonked myself down in the chair and ignored everything, telling myself that I can’t move off my arse until it’s all done. It seems to be working.

Ranfurly Review
The 13th issue of Ranfurly Review has finally gone live. It was by FAR the toughest issue I’ve published despite having done so much early work for it. My mistake was letting it settle. I allowed it to fall out of my immediate memory to the point I got into a fuddle when it came to refreshing myself with it again for publication. That and layout problems with new software I was trialling to “help make things easier” didn’t help either, so I had to resort to my old and trusted method: OpenOffice, PaintShop Pro and Dreamweaver.

Coffee Disaster
My boss bought me a cappuccino on the way to a meeting yesterday afternoon. We sat down at a table to discuss our agenda, and when I opened my mouth to talk my pen fell out of my gob and into my coffee, sliding through the foam and disappearing like a thin submarine in a very big hurry. Typical.

Savvy Workshop
I posted my first assignment to the One Story, Many Voices Workshop at Savvy Authors. It was late but I got it in before the absolute deadline. I don’t intend on letting that happen again as I hate letting people down. My base story is called THIS IS IT and was a touch over the 1k limit, but I like the characters and I like the idea. After posting I read the script for exercise 2: I have to adapt what is currently a contemporary literary story into a mystery/suspense one. Not as easy as one might imagine but a nice challenge as that’s my favourite genre to write.

Scruffy Dog Review
Finally, some news of a rather large nature. Last night, after months of careful thought, I resigned from the Editorial Board of the Scruffy Dog Review. It was a tough decision but it’s the right one under the circumstances. I’ll miss being part of it as an Associate Editor and Webmaster, but I’ll always treasure the last five years and especially my column, SCOTLAND’S TREASURE, which now, alas, is no more.

The next issue of SDR is soon to go live, which will contain my final SCOTLAND’S TREASURE column. I’ll let you know when it’s published.

JANUARY OFFERS

Get 25% off STELLA, my spy novella with a twist, when you order the e-book from the publisher’s website at www.eternalperss.biz. Simply quote 612JMZN67VZX at checkout.