Flux, the piece I had accepted by the lovely people at Short, Fast & Deadly appears in this week's issue I'd completely forgotten it was due for inclusion this week, and was mildly startled when I saw my name. Not because I wasn't expecting my piece to appear, but actually because my first thought was that there was another writer with the same name as me. This idiocy was rather reminiscent of the time when I was watching a television programme (which had a title like Builders From Hell or something) in which my house had been used as the location for a 'sting' to entrap some sort of rogue trader into ripping off a homeowner. The homeowner in question was not, of course, me, but a producer from the programme pretending to live in my house. If you are wondering how I became embroiled in this sort of nonsense, it was a result of a friend working as a researcher on the series and offering me £100 for the use of my home for an afternoon. Anyway. While watching the programme, upon seeing said rogue trader being offered a cup of tea, I remarked, "Oh, I've got mugs like that." To which my boyfriend replied patiently, "Jo... they were in your house."

Oh yes. Of course. Totally forgot.

In other news, I've just returned from a long weekend in the Scottish Highlands, my second-favourite place in the world. (My favourite, of course, being the Western Isles, also in Scotland - I mention that only because I know you were about to lose sleep wondering, yes?) It was as stunningly beautiful and inspiring as it always is, and I saw a deceased pine marten. Seeing interesting dead things is often the highlight of my day, as is perhaps hinted at in the Short, Fast & Deadly story. I'd rather see a live pine marten, obviously, but a dead one is nearly as good.

I think the spirit of a taxidermist lurks within me. The big irony is that I could no more kill anything myself than I could fly to the moon unaided.

While I was away, I finally finished reading The Children's Book by AS Byatt, and found it both fascinating and moving. It has a huge cast of characters, all of them flawed, but most of them redeemed in one way or another, and rarely have I read a book where I cared so much about so many people. It begins in 1895 and is set among a community of creative, Bohemian people - Fabian Society members, devotees of the late 19th century Arts & Crafts Movement, writers, sculptors, radicals. It follows two generations of this community until the end of the First World War. At first, it appears that the children are leading the most idyllic lives possible, but it's soon revealed that there are times when the parents' creative talents are being explored at the expense of their children, and that the relationships between parents and children, and between the children themselves, are far more complicated than it first seems.

One theme that recurs throughout involves late-Victorian/Edwardian notions of childhood - this was perhaps the first time that childhood came to be celebrated in literature, by authors like E. Nesbitt, JM Barrie and Lewis Carroll. But how much of this was actually about adults wanting to remain children, while neglecting the needs of their own offspring? The consequences of the parents' actions continue to impact on the children throughout the novel as they grow up, and the First World War at the end almost seems to be the culmination of that - one generation's mistakes having a devastating impact on the next.

I wholly recommend The Children's Book, even if some of the descriptions of fin-de-siecle art, literature and politics can drag at times.

No idea what I'm going to read next. The pile of about thirty unread books next to my bed is calling. I may close my eyes and pick one at random (which will inevitably be from the middle of a stack and send the whole lot crashing to the floor).

Minor success II

I managed to sell a piece!

Admittedly, said piece was 100 words long (I may have mentioned my word count OCD before) and my payment was the princely sum of US$5, which I believe is about three quid. But it's a start, and I'm excited for that reason alone.

The piece was for a feline fiction-themed website, Hazard Cat. Considering my piece was about a cat that had been killed and bricked up in the wall of a house, I confess to being a wee bit surprised to get an acceptance, but the utterly charming lady who runs said website said she liked it. She also accepted an equally dark little piece from my good friend RS Bohn, so it seems that she doesn't mind the occasional sinister catfic among the nicer stuff.

So, at 34, my total proceeds from fiction writing are:

A bottle of cheap champagne
Approximately £3

I'll just be keeping that resignation letter for my day job on file for a bit longer, then, eh?

Minor success

Following the acceptance of one of my 420-character flash fiction pieces to Short, Fast And Deadly last week, I discovered this week that I have also won a competition on The World Cloud. This was a nice surprise. Apparently I've won either flowers or champagne. I chose champagne despite being currently unable to drink alcohol, on the grounds that I can give it to someone else as a present. Thrift comes naturally to those of us who have spent the majority of their lives skint.

The competition was to write 200 words from the point of view of an inanimate object. I chose the wedding ring of a couple getting married in the early months of the Second World War. It didn't turn out at all as I intended. I actually had in mind my grandmother, who wore her wedding ring through almost 60 years of marriage before managing to lose it somehow, a year or two after my grandfather died. But a 200 word limit didn't allow me to encompass the key events in the life of a wedding ring and sadly I had to kill the husband off in the war. Cruel of me, really, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

I should point out, for the sake of honesty, that this competition didn't have a great deal of entries and most of them were drivel, so I'm not as excited as I might otherwise have been. But winning was, as my mother would say, better than than a kick in the teeth.