WHERE THERE'S A WILL, THERE'S A WON'T.

Well, I warned you things would be a bit quiet around here for a short while, didn't I?

So let's catch up.

Firstly, health matters are slowly on the improve. Luscious can get out of bed now, as the bed rest and immobility appear to have finally gotten a grip on her condition. Miss 11's asthma is being managed: her birth mother was a chronic asthmatic, and I'm all too familiar with the routines associated with breath testing, puffs, washing of chambers and associated routinery, and Lyn's eldest came close to death when younger from the same condition, so we're both hypersensitive to any changes in breathing pattern, lip colouration, or tingling in the extremities. In other words, we're all over Miss 11 like blankets on a pig. And we continue the hospital trips and juices in support of Master 8, who had had pipes up his nose, down his throat, into his stomach and just about every orifice except his third eye and still maintains a diagnosis of Rumination Syndrome and the best we can do is manage it and hope it goes away.

As always, a change in habit becomes the habit becomes normality: we live our lives around puffers and vomit bags and we keep moving on.

Writing-wise, Marius and Gerd have officially completed their journey, and so I move on to other things: Magwitch and Bugrat is with a publisher, and I'm feeling the itch to write fresh words, which means I really have to shift my arse and complete the editing on Father Muerte and the Divine so I can get it out of my in-tray. I'm desperate to start a new novel by the beginning of November, so expect the odd excerpt from the Muerte work as I renew my acquaintance with phrases I thought I was dead clever for writing when I came up with them and decide to share them with you.

First off the rank for me, however, is a jaunt to the murderous confines of CrimeScene WA, the crime writing convention taking place this weekend, where I'll be co-presenting a critiquing panel with Juliet Marillier and Alisa Krasnostein. Two days of lazing about the hotel, talking shop, expanding my skill set and teasing out the kernel of an idea I have for a crime novel is just the thing I need at the moment: an escape from the pressure of work, an immersion in the world I want to live in full time, and a weekend away with my beautiful wife, it comes at exactly the right time.

Check out the programme here, and head along if you've got a spare day or two: the lineup of speakers looks awesome and anything that teaches you a better way to murder someone can't be all bad, right? I'll pop up a con report after the deal, so you can see what you've missed, but you'd be far better just coming along.

And I'll have another entry in my It Could be You anthology series tomorrow: one of the reasons I've not been blogging is that I've been rereading it, and have once more been lost within it....