O RLY?! In that case, he's due congratulations, inhe? Big Conga Rats, <mack>! =)

Re.: <Panama hats>

Ouch. Meanwhile, back in fiction, there was that sinister hat featuring in Stanislaw Lem's 'Solaris', too. HATS OFF - the darn things are dangerous! :s

Oops. That last comma was an 'e' before I corrected it. Down, Sigmund, down, boy ...

Comma savage, chéri? ;)

Nasty druggy folk-singing gunslingers.

BTW, I am now the proud, if baffled, owner of my first ever stand-alone digital camera, the kind that isn't built into something else. In fact I haven't had a camera of any kind since somebody tried to do a Cousteau with my movie camera about 20 years ago, to see how it did underwater. It didn't.

That's difficult, so here's an alternate clue, same answer:

Do I have three utterances left in me?

Time will tell. Et tu, Bruce, as Robin - aka Dick - said to Batman.

Chess writing is even worse. You can be bitten by a FEN and catch a nasty dose of PGN. Which plays hell with the pagination system and is rough on the vowels.

Can I please ask you to cool it?

Or in words that you might use about me - "a tad self important"?

The use of exclams is highly subjective. I absolutely hate them in fiction or journalism. But in posts like these they can be used to convey emotion, denote that we are being sarcastic, ironic, or sincere. It is so hard to indicate emotion and tone in an email or a post.

But, hey. It's fun. And I wrote a thousand-word newspaper article in the last hour, so I can sometimes do that too.

It's all part of my long-term masterplan: when I finally publish a book it will have, oh, anything up to ten potential readers, if I combine my Frogspawn and art-crit 'fanbases'.

I know exactly what you mean! (Oops, a screamer crept in there. Humble whatnots)

The problem I find is that CG.com offers instant gratification. I write something without an editor telling me whether it's fit for publication and then I get an almost instant response. Sometimes a good response. Sometimes a bad response. But it's feedback, human contact, a conversation.

By contrast, writing a book means months of hard work with with no feedback from anyone. Apart from my son who likes the funny bits, especially references to bottoms and wind. And all the time you are wondering if you've chosen the right theme, the right tone, the right setting. Will people get the point, or is it so screamingly obvious that it really didn't need to be spelt out so explicitly.

Then when it's done it's down to the tedious (for me at least) business of error-checking, proof-reading and slaughtering our darlings.

And then when you've done all that, you send it off to the slush-pile and waiting for the stream of rejection letters...

Or you slip on your mask, pull on the superhero lycra, turn from mild mannered civil servant into everyone's grandma <Once>. And get an instant hit from a short story that may or may not have something to do with chess.

- Lookee there! What's *that*? Is it a bird, a plane ...?

- No, that's a demonstrative adjective and pronoun.