First the bad news. My chair is dead.

The leather swivel recliner chair, I mean. The one I sit in four or five hours a day in my study, working or writing. The steel spindle that the chair swivels on snapped like a toothpick. I may need to diet. Anyhow, the chair's dead, and it was only eighteen months old. There's £300 ($600) I won't see again.

In the busy final week of my current work contract I wasted four precious hours today trying to locate a replacement for that damn chair. From the look of the shop assistant I might as well have been asking for a raccoon-skin igloo. When I got home it took me four minutes to find one online.

Anyhow, I expect to have a shiny expensive new chair by the weekend, and then I intend to use it. I intend to pull together this Moderator story and bring it to a suitable conclusion - at least to the point where folks who want to do epilogues can do so. I have other PVB stories stacking up too - a Boss Deadeyes chapter that's just waiting for an item of information from Vizh to be complete; two Tom Black chapters awaiting approval from AG, a Juniors/Caph focussed Untold Tales that might become two or maybe three Untold Tales. It's nearly triple-sized now and I've just got to the plot part.

Since I'm finishing work on Friday, I intend to focus some attention on the other elements of my life. I intend to Get A Grip. Be frightened.

In other news, Assembled (or as it must henceforth be known, Assembled 1), a collection of articles about the Avengers comic which includes some pieces by me, has apparently sold pretty well for a niche book. It's available from Amazon and Diamond but since the profits go to charity then if you want a copy you'd be better buying from http://www.lulu.com/content/1019167 . The difference is that around 50 cents goes to charity on the Amazon and Diamond volumes because they take a hefty cut, and around $5 goes to charity on the ones bought direct from Lulu.

So far we've raised around $1100, and there's a cheque due to be presented to the charity The Hero Initiative (a charity that helps out down-on-their-luck old comics creators) at HeroesCon 2008. I'm invited to be on a panel there about the book but I don't think I'll be able to make it.

I've just completed the seven or eight pieces I promised to do for Assembled 2, which White Rocket books are aiming to get out around the time of the Iron Man movie. White Rocket also recently published a short story I wrote, "Worst Origin Ever", in an anthology in their Sentinels series, but I haven't seen a copy yet.

Far less interestingly, a couple of "how to" manuals (or "toolkits" as the publishers insist on calling them) that I wrote about running voluntary sector agencies in the UK and about good practice in local government contracting rounds have been picked up for national circulation. This isn't exciting even to me, except that possibly a few people might want to employ me because of it.

Anyway, enough about me. Back to mourning my chair.

IW

The only e-mail I've received from you (or anyone at the PMB) was the reply to my "I'm stuck" message, and I've read through that a couple of times but I don't see anything in there about needing a name from me...

Not a chair (I have one that works fine) but one of the "toolkits" just to say I own a piece of Ian Watson penned literature. But then the Assembled book would be cool, too.

Sorry to hear about the chair.

I've been pushing to fix the bigger and more annoying bugs in the board software, and updating the Administrator so it's up to date and has all its features working. This week I've taken up the task of designing a replacement for the text processing engine (the one that makes sure the subject lines and text don't have malicious or broken tags, etc). The new one won't have that problem of a wayward tag eating the entire text...as soon as I get it to work right, that is.

Writing-wise, I'm kind of stuck. I got so far ahead on tie-ins I don't have any more to write, and I can't start anything new PV-related till the Moderator Saga is over. I've been writing a little World Class, but not much. That's why I had nothing to post last weekend.