I have to admit, though I haven’t forgotten about Foody Fridays, the fact it’s now June somehow past me by. I owe you a good selection of Victorian ketchups!

In the meantime, I have been keeping busy. Ravenous Romance put out a call for subissions for a fairy-tale inspired LGBT anthology, and I submitted a short story inspired by the Swan Maiden myths. I only discovered the anthology (thank you to K V Taylor) a few weeks before the deadline, so I was polishing it desperately on Monday evening, banking on the difference in timezones to get away with it! Normally I’d like to put a story like that aside for a week, and then polish, but unlike Douglas Adams I don’t have the luxury of listening to the deadlines whoosh by. The first half was a fourth draft, but the second half was written over the weekend.

Fingers-crossed, anyway. It shouldn’t be too long a way, since the anthology is due to come out in July.

The bleedover from the pressure is a desire to keep writing, even though that story is out of my hands, so I’ve started a new ghost story. It’s inspired by this news story, which reminded me of the opening of The Exorcist, and just couldn’t be let go.

Working the other way, two of today’s reports reminded me of some of my favourite stories! The International Atomic Energy Agency are sterilising mosquitos, which is disturbingly reminiscent of the opening of Raccoona Sheldon’s The Screwfly Solution, while in South West England people have reported flashes of green light in the sky; an invasion from Mars, or the beginning of mass blindness before carniverous plants take over the world? And you thought global warming was on the only sci-fi predicted threat we were facing this year!