September

This weekend was a Bank Holiday - that curious British tradition where most people go to the pub and get drunk all day, drive to B&Q warehouses to buy gardening and DIY supplies, or drag caravans along the major motorways and sit in traffic queues with complaining kids,  while the rest of us just stay at home and relax.

This weekend, however, the wife and I went to view a couple of houses we liked. One of them we like enough that we think we'd like to buy it. On Saturday we accepted an offer on our place and have arranged a second viewing this week...after four months of zero movement on the house front, this is exciting news.

Next week my son starts High School. I'm terrified how old that makes me.

On the writing front, I've now handed in the final edit of There's a Bluebird in My Heart, and hopefully the chapbook will get an October release. I'm very excited about this project.

While I was writing the story it occurred to me that I'd like to write more tales set in the same fictional world. Perhaps a sequence of loosely-linked stories, going under the title of Invisible Monsters. We'll see.

I've started thinking about submitting a proposal for a new short story collection to a few publishers, but I'm not in a hurry. I have a couple of new short stories on the boil that I'd like to finish first.

I've been thinking a lot about the novel at the minute - the one I've now been working on, on and off, for about three years. Later this week, now that I've got Bluebird settled, I plan to dive back into that beast and crack on to the end.