Le Mag

How long's it been? At least 22 years, and now at least half of you are drawing your old age pensions... (Or in the case of one Steve R, died, passed right through the light and reincarnated...) :->
So Issue 5 then, is now going to be a double with Issue 6, due out end of this month. Oh yes.(Another computer blew out on me, losing about half the contents of Ish 5 in the process - hence delays on mags & website updates etc. Have now given up using other peeps gronky second hand machines and have got a lovely new HP beastie that seems to be behaving itself so far.)

Issue 7/8, another double issue, will be out July.
After that, we'll be open to submissions (new guidelines & rates etc will go on site in June) and I'm looking at sorting out a more sensible (timely) schedule. Ideally I'd like to get another issue out this year, most likely Nov/Dec - after I've got Fantasycon out of the way, then after that we'll probably be shifting to a bi-annual schedule for '06.
Will update the the website with the basic details this week, and will save the complete site overhaul til June/July.

Fantasycon

Yoiks. We've got Simon Clark and Mark Chadbourn confirmed as GoHs, and are waiting to hear back on an MC and third GoH.
But more on that another time, else I'll get distracted.

The fabulous book de la mama...

...is going to be launched next week! That mother person got her freebie copies a couple of weeks ago and has been nagging me to get a website up for her before the thing hits the streets. No pressure. Oy vey.
Actually the book don't look too bad (forgetting the completely jumbled contents page and the last minute addition of pictures in odd places because they'd decided they'd finalised the text layout, finito.) And can I just be a little bit smug in the fact that half the editorial changes the publisher guy asked for were ones that I'd suggested to herself but she decided to ignore (snigger!) - plus the layout people used a couple of things in the book that I'd put on her manuscript to neaten it up. :-> It's the small things...!

So the beast is called 'First Time Tenant' by Patricia Barber, available for ordering anywhere you like. (And a good daughter would be organised enough to put a link up, but the good daughter's down in Bournemouth so you're stuck with me...)
Her website will (eventually) be at www.first-time-tenant.com next week (oh grief, I think it was .com, it's on my list of things to check.)

And herself has started the first draft on a companion Landlords book (meant to be more of 'here's how to get a stress free tenancy' than the bundles of bizarre techy stuff most other buy-to-let books do).

And wouldn't you know, now that we don't need funny renting stories for the PR (we spent December/January racking our brains for oddities); funny stories are popping up all over the place. Like Tuesday, herself had to check out a flat previously occupied by a total nutcase who was evicted because he shit in the doorways of all the other flats in the block. And apart from trashing the place, he left a live chicken in the oven. (Well, I'm sure it was live when he left it there, by the time mum got in to see it it was going green and pretty much as gross as you'd imagine!)

Lovely.