It's been a while since I had anything to add here. I was worried that might happen. My life is much too dull for a blog really...but what the hell.

Just about all I’ve done over the last two weeks is scan photos and make web pages. It’s surprising just how much time it eats up. Take the new Pumpkinhead gallery: twenty-four photos. And it’s not just a matter of scanning them either. They have to be resized and compressed and given a numbered file name so the gallery creator places them in the right order. I messed that up with Pumpkinhead and had to start over. It would happen with the biggest gallery too, wouldn’t it? Then each page has to be messed with so it has that cool textured background and a caption to go with it. It all takes time. But I’m getting there slowly.

While I was working on the site on Sunday an e-mail arrived. They’re usually newsletters, but I checked it out anyway. It turned out to be the editor of Thirteen Magazine saying he really liked Pin the Devil and wants to put it in the next issue. I sat back and smiled. Pin the Devil was possibly the second or third short story I ever wrote going back, hell, must be over twenty years ago. Can you imagine that? Oh, it was terribly bloated back then when I didn’t really have much of a clue what I was doing. It rambled on for 12,000 words. I remember a guy who I used to work with reading it. “That’s good,” he said. “It took it a while to get there, like, but it’s good.” Mick and I never really got on very well, but his comment made me do a double take. On the heels of ‘What the hell do you know?’ I thought, he’s right, it does take a while to get there.

That kind of thing still happens now. Right out of the blue someone will say something about a story, will look at it from an angle that I hadn't even realised was there. My friend, Ste will send back a story with comments and I’ll read one and think, ‘What the hell does he know?’ and then on the heels of that I realise he’s right. Pisses me right off. I do the same with his work, and he often feels the same way. It seems it's impossible to write a story without blinkers on; it's so very much easier to spot these things in other people’s stories than it is in your own.

A few years ago I gutted Pin the Devil. It runs at 4,700 words in the rewrite. What the hell did I ramble on about in those additional 7,000 words? And now it’s found a home at Thirteen Magazine. I feel very satisfied with that.

Best
Alan