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So 2010 has only just begun, and I have a handful of new publications that I need to mention. They’ve all been out for at least a week (or a fortnight or even a month), but I haven’t mentioned them yet. This is because I thought to myself “The next blog post I make will be a review of 2009, so I can’t update about anything else until I have reviewed 2009”. And then I never got around to thinking…

What do Neil Gaiman, Ali Smith, Nick Cave, and Margaret Atwood have in common? Stolen Stories! Stolen Stories is a 10-week evening class at Glasgow University on using mythology, fairy tales, history, and classic literature to create original fiction. Classes begin on the 14th of January, and run 7pm-9pm on Thursdays. The cost is £75 for the 10-week course. If you have any questions, please email me.

Towards the end of December, the pages of my day-planner are whiter than the 4am snow. Every other week of the year is full of black scribbles, crossings-out, and attempts to do three different things in three different places during one Wednesday lunchtime. But those December days! Blank and free; perfect for writing. I can finish my novel, write some new poems, start that screenplay I keep boring people with. I’ll get to it, right after I eat my turkey…

Now it’s time for an early night, hot chocolate, and a trashy crime thriller. Damn, I’m so rock ‘n’ roll.

I’ve been very quiet lately, I know; blame NaNoWriMo. I was doing pretty well with my typing (at this speed I wouldn’t dare to call it ‘writing’), but then I got an upper respiratory tract infection and spent three days in bed. There’s still time!

I seem to have a mental block on making this weekly, so I think I should just give in and call it the fortnightly check-in. Acceptances: 3 ­– and as I’m so tardy with my updates, they’ve all been published. Coffee Break at The Pygmy Giant is a quirky future-tense romance; The Last 3,600 Seconds at Circlet is apocalyptic erotica (apocarotica?); And The Devil Makes Three is a “poetic vampire story” which won an honourable mention in Oysters and Chocolate’s…