I'm going to start this post the same way I started the last one: I got a really nice rejection letter for "Thieves" from an agent today. Except this time I'm not being even remotely glib; insofar as a rejection letter is ever a good thing, this one was a positive rejection. It was personal, encouraging and had some great suggestions, some of which hit a few bullseyes in terms of thoughts I have had since 'finishing' the thing.

I've often wondered whether I can even write, or whether that's just the normal self-doubts, and whether time spent worrying about that is time wasted that could be better spent with a pen in your hand. But on the flipside, everyone thinks they can write, and most people just can't. So this was a somewhat validating rejection letter. In the end, she said, it was too close in terms of period and genre to a book she is already representing for her to take it on. I don't know whether that means it was a near-miss or not. I'm certainly not taking that for granted, though, and her comments are stone-set as far as I'm now concerned.

What I was touched by was that even though she was turning it down, she still took the time to write this letter, describe what worked for her, how I could change things to make things better, squeeze more potential out of the material. She was turning it down, she had absolutely nothing to gain from taking the time to tell me any of this, yet she still did. I won't name the agent, or the agency (it was one of the big ones), but I was impressed. Whilst you hear about people in the publishing industry having sold their souls to the corporate devil, what you actually find more often than not is that at the heart of it are people who really just care about stories as much as readers (and writers) do.

But at the end of the day, it really is my loss to have missed the opportunity with someone who shared my vision for this silly old story of mine, albeit so briefly.

Tuesday 22nd January 2008, 7.50pm

I got a really nice photocopied rejection letter for "Thieves" from an agent today, the first one. It was five weeks overdue, so I'd given up on hearing a response and moved on to the next one on the (alphabetical) list of potentials. Twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred can say no; it only takes one to say yes. And by "really nice" I mean I could have taught them a thing or two about photocopying, oh yes. I don't intend to send it to a hundred, mind you. If nobody has shown any interest by the time I finish the new one (more on which later), I'll just post it up here instead and call it even.

People who should be slapped this week include: the really cool kids who were playing a game of cat and mouse with police on the railway tracks between Wickford and Billericay stations last night, and who were finally tracked down and arrested after a couple of hours. Seriously, just run them down with the bloody train. If they won't get out of the way, that only adds more strings to the bow of Darwinism and natural selection, not to mention the council houses that will be freed up for people who have a truly desperate need for them.

Also due a slap this week is that bloke on the tax advert who says "Tax needn't be taxing" or somesuch thing. No, because you also do that show on Channel 4, so you can afford to pay a good accountant. I was getting stressed about all that untaxed income paid directly into my account for the freelance proof-reading work. Unable to make head nor tail of HM R&C's self-assessment system, I fell on the mercy of the Citizen's Advice Bureau, which just kept sending me back to the Revenue and Customs website that had pickled me in the first place. Fortunately our lovely payroll administrator at work agreed to process those earnings through the system there. Which involved me writing my employer a cheque for the entire amount. It isn't meant to be this way!

Sunday 13th January 2008, 7.46pm

So I've been back in the UK a week now, and it's almost two months since I last posted anyway, so I thought it about time. As with my return last time, I felt for some reason compelled to have a massive clear-out, so that's what I've been busy with outside of work this week. Three big pink sacks of paper and plastic have already left the building on a course for recycling. I've got rid of the last of my high school exercise books (with a few choice pages torn out) and have even been able to get rid of some of my primary school stuff. Including an extra-curricular story I wrote about my class getting stranded on a desert island. It starts with the headmaster going crazy and jumping to his death onto the rocks, then later includes scenes of urination, circumcision, torture and naked "smooching" (as I called it). I was ten.

Some stuff I want to get rid of, but for some reason keep, knowing I'll be able to toss it out next time round. So the way I figure it is that even if I only get rid of about twenty percent of the clutter each time, eventually that's going to work its way down until I really only have stuff I actually need or want. Anyway, being busy with this means I haven't yet had an opportunity to upload any of the photos I took. I took about two hundred this time, even though I was only there three weeks. Last time I didn't know just how many shots my camera's card could hold, so held back in case I ran out of space. When I got back I discovered I had room for over six hundred. So this time I didn't hold back. A good sixty of them are of cats, seeing as they seemed to be everywhere we went. The best ones are from the top of the John Hancock Centre in Chicago. But more on that later.

Three weeks of course isn't enough time to 'do' America, nor get the sense of what it's really like living amongst the indigenous population (normal Americans, that is, not Cherokee, Sioux et al). Yes, this time I was but a full-time tourist. However, I did feel the mood had changed. Last time I was there every third or fourth car bore a Bush sticker. This time I only saw one of those the entire time. The rise of Barack Obama I think reflects the change in mood best. Like David Cameron, he hasn't made many concrete commitments to what he'd actually do, he has simply become the figurehead, the face of the change Americans want. Everyone's sick of George W Bush, finally. He has reverted to his pre-9/11 lame duck status. Nobody's listening to what he's saying, and nobody wants to.

This week I reopened my Amazon Marketplace listings. I closed them in July because sales had dwindled. With an average 300 listings I had been selling about four items a day. This then dwindled to about four items a week, and it was always the cheapest things selling, so I was basically queuing up in the Post Office near work for half an hour each lunchtime to barely cover the cost of what I'd make if I'd just spent the time at my desk instead. But I did kinda miss having the extra pocket money, so I decided to reopen my listings, but bump up the prices, so that even if I didn't get many sales, at least when I did it'd be worth my while. And so far I've had nine sales, including several books I bought for 50p selling for in the region of £4. Yesterday I couldn't help myself and bought a bagful of 'stock' from a charity shop. And I've already made my money back on selling two of the books.

Whilst I was away, both Jenna and I drew up lists of ten things we're going to do this year. Some of them will possibly never happen, some of them have been on similar unwritten lists of goals for previous years, some require a serious commitment and hard graft, and some (like finishing my copyediting course, and going to France when Jenna's over in a couple of months, more on which later) will happen just in the course of things. Though it isn't explicitly on the list, I was inspired by my return to Michigan to also return to "The Bottle Collectors", which I submitted once, 18 months ago, then pretty much forgot about behind "The Thieves of Pudding Lane". I'm going to rewrite the beginning, which had a tortured process, given that it was written in snatches in Jenna's apartment at CMU whilst she was at class. Then we'll see.