One hell of a shock

Imagine: You are reading a newspaper in bed and, as you turn the page, you see a picture of somebody you have known for fourteen years and, by the photo, an article saying the person was missing. You stare at it in dismay, reading and re-reading, looking at the clock to check that you're not asleep and this is actually a dream. From memory you realise that the last time you contacted the person was two weeks ago and they seemed absolutely fine, in great form, and yet according to the article they went missing seven days ago.

Fiction? No. As I read the Manchester Evening News on Tuesday night I read that my good friend Jillian Langley had gone missing the previous Tuesday. According tothe article Jillian had left for work and, some time later that morning, her handbag was found in a toilet at Stockport bus station, but of Jillian there was no sign. Thankfully she has contacted the police to say that she is safe and well. This really overshadowed the week and I'm completely stunned by it. Jilly - if you're reading this (and I know that you do) please drop me a line, or give me a ring, and let me know you're okay. I'm worried about you, and I can't begin to think how Dave and James felt. Let me know you're okay x

In other news...

Had a great couple of days at the start of the week running 2071 (SQL 2000 querying) for a fab bunch of people. I really enjoyed the course and I think they did too. I'm in Leeds for the next two weeks running 2073 and then a custom 2071/2072 again, but then I'm back to Manchester for a week. Busy times.

Had a mad moment last weekend. Woke up, grabbed the laptop, and built a SQL 2005 database to keep track of all our CDs. If this wasn't sad and geeky enough, I then started to build a VB application (using Visual Studio 2005) as a front-end to this. To my surprise it worked really well and, although unfinished, some people at work are asking for copies! How bizarre.

Amazon are back in favour by the way. Last week I was upset that they had made a mess of my order of the full-colour remastered edition of "House of Leaves" by sending a "blue" paperback copy. Well, after an email rant, they came back to me to say the cost of postage to return the incorrect item to the US was prohibitive, so I could keep the "wrong" copy and they would send a full-colour copy the same day. Yay! This now means that on my shelf I now have three copies of "House of Leaves", and a fourth is currently on its way to me. Lou, needless to say, is baffled.

Writing news! Had a nice email from Neil Marr at Bewrite yesterday inviting me into a new book Bewrite are planning for launch before Christmas. The book will be an anthology of "flash fiction" - i.e. stories of around three hundred and fifty words or less. Now flash fiction is something I've never really played with, but as soon as I read the email two stories immediately popped into my head, and about an hour ago I wrote the first... which is my first story in three years!!! Its title is "Katie's Hair", it is three hundred and thirteen words long, and I'm very pleased with it. As soon as I've finished this blog entry I'm starting work on "Wherever I Go", which was the second of the ideas I had. This project has really enthused me. Don't worry though: "Can't Remember?", "Within", "The Routine", "The Ten" and so on are stil bubbling away and will be finished in due course.

Anyway the sun is shining in a cloudless sky as I look out of the window, so I really shouldn't be sitting indoors bashing away on my laptop. Things to do...