Edmund Lester

Life has a habit of throwing you curve balls and recently it seems to have upped the ante. I mentioned in two of my recent blog entries that I'd been ill. This year's flu landed and decided to stay put for a while. Well if I was ever inclined to complain about the flu all such thoughts have been ripped from  me. you see earlier this month - just after my last posting here - my wife had a stroke. That kind of puts everything else into perspective in a hurry. Fortunately it was a small stroke and they quickly identified the underlying cause of the stroke and that it was fixable - the cause that is. So she has surgery this past week and now has the most impressive scar - her neck is currently held together by over 30 staples. There is still some time to go but she should make a near complete recovery. So all in all it was not as bad as it could have been. As you might imagine I have not even thought of writing even as an abstract concept in two weeks and my plans to get back ...

Just a very quick blog post to say my interview with the Dark Times fanzine has gone live. You can go read it together with a whole bunch of horror and RPG related stuff at The Dark Times Fanzine Issue 2 I think I have another interview still due to come out - I just don't know when. I will of course post detail as soon as I know anything. Managed to get a little book hunting in yesterday and found a small pile of Terry Pratchett hardcovers and one old Isaac Asimov hardcover - a Short History of Biology. I already owned a copy of that edition of the Asimov but it was in such good condition and at such a good price I couldn't resist adding a second. Of course I could say I ready had the Pratchetts too as I have the full run of Discworld in paperback but I had none of them in hardcover so I'm happy with them. Away from books I've been watching the Orville on Fox. We're a little behind the US so have only seen up to episode five but I'm very impressed. Epi...

Ever made a bunch of promises to yourself that you just couldn't keep? We all do it I guess. Well my writing targets were one of those. I wanted to get the 1st full draft of the novel I'm writing done by the end of 2017. It didn't happen. There were reasons for it - there always are. Some of them are valid reasons. As I may have mentioned back in November I was ill. Well I've been ill again. I had a bout of stomach flu in November and then just before Christmas I managed to also catch the good old regular flu - or one of this year's variants of it - possibly Aussie flu but who knows for sure. Well I managed once again to keep going as far as the day job goes only to collapse on the sofa each evening and try to recover for the next day. The day job was as much as I could manage. Put it this way, that's the part of my life that pays the mortgage; it will always come first in such considerations. The Christmas break came and I spent some time with the family...