It’s morning and it’s cold and I’m sitting in the study with bare feet, kicking my heels against the floorboards, which is basically one of my favourite things ever. Eventually it will get too cold and I’ll be forced to put on socks, or shoes, or slippers, but for the moment this is one of those pleasantly cold mornings made for barefooted padding about the house.

There were contracts in the mail this morning, which probably means it’s safe to mention that The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi, my story from Shimmer’s Clockwork Junglebook issue, is going to be reprinted in the Mammoth Book of Steampunk alongside lots of very cool other stuff.

And I will probably mention this again, in more detail, once I’m back into the blogging habit and used to saying things in public again, but my friend Chris Green has released a short story collection, Love and Other Losses, for the Kindle. If you all went and bought it now, I wouldn’t have to write several hundred words that essentially boil down to “Chris Green is a phenomenal short story writer and this collection is really good” in order to convince you to purchase.

I own a copy and I don’t even own a kindle (I’m old-school; I read my ebooks on the computer).

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I’ve been hand-writing things a lot lately, which is unusual for me. Partially this is the result of the broken office chair, partially it’s the result of me getting sick of sitting in front of the computer and not-writing, but the net result is more time spent with a pen and a notepad and loose-leaf paper, scribbling things.

It has the neat side-effect of making it virtually impossible to work out how much I’ve written on any given day. I can make guesses – possibly even educated guesses – but I’m denied the accuracy of the quick wordcount. It’s a vaguely weird way to work, all things considered, and I’m unsure how writers managed it in the old times before word processors.

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Yep, still no third point to the entry. I’m having a very two-point kind of week.