We managed a writing session again this morning, after having yesterday off. I actually got down to figuring out what my current story is about. Having done that I now feel much more confident about it again. I was having a downer on it yesterday when I was drifting a little. Now I feel it's going to be great again.

Having something to aim at is one of those blindingly-obvious-but-often-forgotten writing things. Someone at our Clarion West class (possibly Jack Womack) made the point that you need to know where you're going in a story. You don't need to know how to get there, and the destination point may change by the end, but you do need that target on the distant hills. You don't have to go there in a straight line. You can waver and wander in between but you need to keep the target in your sight. It's surprisingly true. Now that I have a target, everything is falling into place and it all seems cool again. Without a target, the prospect of the story seemed amorphous and unfocused.

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As those of you who read Steph's journal know, she sold her second story to Strange Horizons, just a month after the first one. Normally we'd head straight out to celebrate, except we were both feeling a bit under the weather, and anyway we don't have any money at the moment. The celebration has been postponed until October, but it should be fun then.

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George Bush's latest butt monkey, Allawi, the supposed prime minister of Iraq, the former CIA operative imposed upon the country, has been doing the rounds in the US saying what a great guy Bush is and how awful Kerry is to criticise him. Now, if this just had implications for the US elections it could probably just be brushed off as a piece inappropriate intervention by a foreign head of state, but it doesn't, and that is the sad thing. If the Iraqi provisional authority is to have any chance of winning the trust of Iraqis, it can't show itself as to be a puppet of the US. Every time it does that, as Allawi has this week, it becomes less of a legitimate, effective government in Iraq and more obviously a puppet regime of the US government.

And can someone tell me why Iraq is being described as a democracy? The current government has been imposed by an invading force, not elected by the people. How is that democratic? Is it supposedly democratic because there might be elections in January (even though Donald Rumsfeld has now said that they may not cover all parts of Iraq)? If so, that's a funny definition of democracy. Does having a dictator imposed by a foreign democratic power make that dictator democratic? Bah to it all, I say.

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I've been wondering whether to review Howard Waldrop's current Sci-Fiction story. It seems that there are two types of people when it comes to Waldrop's stories. There are those who think the man is a genius and his stories are wonderful, and there are those who just don't get them at all. I'm afraid that I'm in the latter camp. I've never got a Waldrop story, not once. The Wolf-Man of Alcatraz is reasonably entertaining, but I'm sure there must be much more to it than that. Many people who are far more intelligent and perceptive and who are far better writers than me think he's great, so there must be something else going on in the stories that I'm missing. Can anyone tell me what it is? I hate to feel like the stupid kid in the class.