I shot the database. I didn't really.

Well, I don't know. You veritably prostrate yourself all over our inbox in your desperation to hear the results of the Coffee and Chocolate competitions, and then we give them to you and you say nothing. Whatsoever. Not a whoop or a boo or an about time too. I don't know.

Mostly this weekend I engaged in a staring competition with the online entries folder, which contained pretty much a hundred emails, all of which needed printing off and databasing come Monday. I stared at it in the hope that it would turn away first, but it didn't. It very much won, and it gave me my customary Monday headache a day early out of pure vicious spite. Then we all databased it this afternoon, which is by and large what it wanted. But don't ever try and make our lots easier by not entering our competitions, because frankly we'd much rather you did than otherwise. I'm only saying. Also I came in half an hour early today with a view to getting started on it, and nobody knows except me, and now everybody. I don't think there's much reward in coming in half an hour early of your own volition unless you subsequently make a spot of noise about it.

Next comes the judging of the Open Short Story and Poetry competitions, which we hope will be concluded by whatever date we said we hoped they'd be concluded by on the website. You'll have to go and look for yourselves really. See how clever? And the Coffee/Chocolate winners are in the process of being edited. Or tomorrow they will be. And 'The Better Craftsman' is being formatted mostly and will be being bookified inordinately soon, about which we're all massively excited. I fancy it's going to have a faintly intruiging spine. Two competitions remain open - Science Fiction and Micro-Fiction - as does the open submission call for novella(e)(s). Which is yielding lots of novellas, essentially, and that's about all you can ask of it. Bravo.

The loos here, by the way, smell faintly of aniseed. Things could be worse.

Sam.