49,935 Words

It's been a tough couple of weeks, writing-wise. The mysterious J and his offer have vanished as suddenly and unexpectedly as they appeared. In addition, my brother and I had been, for several weeks, developing an idea for a free website on which unpublished writers could post samples of their work for peer review and (hopefully) the attention of agents and publishers. I read in Saturday's Guardian that someone has beaten us to it: see thefrontline.com. Maybe there's cyberspace enough for two such sites? I don't know, but for the moment we're abandoning the idea. Perhaps we'll feel differently after a fuller investigation of this new site - perhaps it is sufficiently different from what we had planned to do. All in all though: a depressing time.

A