No desk, no chair, writing again.

I finally got down again to turning out a short story. It's based on a tiny fragment of Eleventh Century history I came across whilst looking for something else.

It helps to think that I might, at last, have found a promising outlet for short stories; I read that the form is making a come back. We'll see.

I have also spoken to the man who runs the MA in Creative Writing at Trinity St Davids; I'm off up to Lampeter to see him next week. I am still asking myself whether this will be at all worthwhile; hopefully I'll get some answers when I visit the department.

A swift glance at the results of writing competitions or the biographies of new published writers seems to confirm the growing influence of courses like the one I am considering. It seems an odd phenomenon and makes me wish that I had had a clearer view of my hopes and ambitions twenty odd years ago, but on one level I think I understand it.

It isn't the writing so much, that really determines whether one succeeds or fails, it is whether one knows how to write for the market, and then how to market oneself and ones writing. How terrible. What it comes down to is having contacts and playing the game; professionally speaking I have never managed that in any line of work. Maybe it's time to get serious.