OVER, ALL OVER..... ONLY FOUR YEARS UNTIL THE NEXT ONE!

Well, I'm back to normal sleeping times now that the World Cup is over, and the Italian National Diving Team have got their hands on The Trophy The Brazilians Didn't Leave in a Rubbish Bin (Liddle World Cup in-joke for the true believers...). Altogether: Fabio Grosso's an arrrrsseeehooollleeee.........

Truth to tell, I'm kind of disappointed they played France. I was hoping Portugal would make it. Wouldn't it have been a laugh? 11 players all falling over simultaneously in different parts of the pitch, clutching theiur ankles and screaming as if they've just been shot with a howitzer, while the ref stands at the centre circle, holding the ball and trying to tell someone that the game hasn't even started yet?

Maybe it's just me...

Anyway, I was pleased to get what I would consider a 'true' final: exciting, controversial, and amidst all the hoo-ha, filled with some damn good football, not that anyone seems to remember that, so badly has the Zidane/Matterazzi spectacle absorbed us all. Finals are often rather boring, with both teams determined not to lose, rather than win. The 3rd place playoff is usually where all the action is: 2 teams with nothing to lose, playing like dervishes. It's usually the best game of the tournament, and it went close again this year. But the final was all I'd hoped for, and of course, we had that head butt.

My opinion: stupid man, that Zidane. It appears that Matterazzi may have called him the "son of a terrorist whore." Is that worth losing the World Cup over? Your dignity? The respect of your team-mates, your country, and the watching world? His final match, and the possibility of holding aloft the greatest prize in world football, pissed away because a thick-headed Italian defender make a comment about his Mum. Has that never happened to Zizou before? I mean, I loved my Mum, but she'd have kicked my head in...

Still, it's all over now, and we can settle in to watch the great Juventus sell off sale begin. Ahhhh, Serie C never looked so good :)

$1.40 A LITRE AND THE IDEA OF DOUBLE VALUE SHOPPING

Petrol prices hit the $1.40 a litre mark during the week, which has made the Luscious One and I re-examine our shopping procedures. All those supermarkets in our local area, offering 4c off this and voucher that... more and more these days, the idea of value-added shopping lies uppermost in our thoughts, what with being skint and needing to stretch everything as far as we can. Do we shop at Coles, get our 4c off petrol plus Fly Buys? IGA gives you 4c, plus they're part of the Super Savers scheme, and you can get multiples of 6c vouchers if you shop wisely. Action give you points towards a $20 voucher to spend on fruit and veg, plus the obligatory 4c off per litre...

Yesterday I found myself nixing a proposed trip to the Wanneroo markets to buy fruit, because by the time we got there, the cost of petrol would have made the trip a false economy. Because we were only going to buy fruit and nothing else.

So I'm interested: are we the only ones who are beginning to think this way? Or is it just the poor? The family-burdened? Or are we all beginning to change the way we view our shopping needs?

If so, what are steps are you taking?

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME.... NOPE, THAT'S IT, SHE LOVES ME

For no reason at all, just because she loves me, Luscious popped into a second hand bookstore and presented me with a hardback anthology called Analog's Golden Anniversary Anthology the other day. Poul Anderson, Asimov, Bova, Fredric Brown, SPrage De Camp, Dickson, Heinlein, Oliver, Schmidt, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, Weinbaum and more: 380 pages of golden age goodness.

When you consioder how utterly meh Analog has become as a magazine, it's sometimes a welcome surprise to be faced with the assemblage of talent it used to collect.

I feel a wallowing a'comin'.....

FALLING OUT OF LIKE

I made a strange discovery during the week: I realised I don't like someone who I had always thought I liked. Normally I realise when I've started to dislike a person, or I dislike them upon contact. But I realised, as I thought "I like Person X, but..." for the umpteenth time in relation to something they said, that I'd been saying this to myself a lot, for a long time, and the truth was, I didn't like them after all.

I have no wisdom to offer about this. It's just a weird feeling, is all.

A QUICK STOCKTAKE IN THE INTERESTS OF INSPIRING ME TO GET OFF MY ASS AND FINISH SOME OF THESE DAMN THINGS

So I've been doing a bit of kvetching (or in Battersby Household Speak: there was kvetchage. which I add only because I think it sounds funny...) because I've got no projects on the go, and nothing in the trunk, and nothing is coming up on the publishing front, so I was a wee bit becalmed. You may have noticed...

Apart from two stories doing the rounds, all I've got out is Napoleone's Land, which sits with agent and publisher; The Ballad of Henry Renfield which awaits publication in the Monster Noir anthology; and Manuscript Found Upon The Body of a Hanged Soldier, a story I completed almost a year ago for the approaching-mythical-status Fading Twilight anthology. None of these have concrete publication dates, so it was anybody's guess as to when I was going to see print again. What's more, I didn't have anything I was really working on, so it was anybody's guess as to when I'd have anything finished.

SO: Luscious is out tonight, the kids are in bed, and I've read all the new posts on the The World Game site. My eyes fall on a stack of half a dozen notebooks I've got sitting above my desk. I'll just have a squizz through them see what's in there.

What I find, after I've transcribed all the pieces into Word, are the beginnings of 30 stories, totalling over 20 000 words!

I'm going to list them, which might bore you to tears because it's no more than list of titles and word counts. But consider it a public shaming: once it's written down, it's in the public sphere, and then I'll have to do something about them. 20 000 words, and he moans about not having anything.... whining maggot.

So, they are:

The Squire 1259
The Escapees 134
Squall 69
Mr Snopes 4058
Most Divine of Winds 236
Magwitch and Bugrat 892
Lethologica 340
Indian Jim 158
In From The Snow 2672
The Corpse-Rat King 3688
Chirsmast 65
Adding Machines 103
A Good Year For The Roses 2227
Where The Jungle Ends 245
Forever Amen 151
One Last Sacrifice 736
Still Life 209
Six Seconds 122
Building 191
The God of Insects 200
Clones, We're All 221
Dudley Awesome, Super Guy! 311
Down Amongst The Teensies 264
A Fork In The Sky 1450
Domitian's Statue 349
Father Muerte & the Bells 82 (Yup, I had the start of a Muerte story, and had forgotten it. Bad author! No biscuit!)
Workbench 459
Playing With Jimi At the Tower of Babel 204
The Undertaker 305
Beyond The Fence 407

There you go. 21 807 words of beginnings. And given I have a second novel to get the hell on with, and I know I have a file full of first pages I should pull out and transcribe, and Iive just been contacted by a newly formed small press publishing company asking if I'm interested in writing a 40-50K novel for them, I really have no bloody excuse any more, do I?

Next time I'll just post some nice pictures of the family, to make up for getting all angsty and self-indulgent, I promise.

Song of the Moment: Generals and Majors XTC