Slightly bigger plug for self

My young adult fantasy fiction novel, After the Dragon, has just been published as an e-book and can be checked out here...

ETA: I forgot to mention it'll also shortly be available in hard copy for those who aren't yet on board with electronic formats.

Calling international

Here's an interesting phenomena that seems be becoming more and more common in the last few months. We try to dial home on our mobiles (the landline being of poor quality) and end up connected to random people around the world rather than the number we actually dialled. The Ambassador tried to call my roaming mobile while I was outside and got a family in the US - who happened to have someone there of my name, which you can imagine was quite confusing. Interestingly, it happened again, and he got the same family.

Another expat got a US family and asked for 'Mum', who was duly put on the phone...then there's the expat who is harressing some poor Chinese guy by dialling the mis-directed number 7 or 8 times in a row just to see what happens.

Since it usually appears to be going to the US, it appears that the network is sometimes randomly dropping our +61 code to +1, routing us to the US instead of Australia.

No posts for a few weeks.

Small plug for self

My short story Excision is out now in Zombies, edited by Robert N Stephenson.

Unfortunately the editor was much better at suggesting structural changes than at copyediting, and has introduced quite a few errors into the story with random deletions of conjunction words like 'and' and 'but'.

He also tacked on his own, misspelled, ending without running it by me first. If you do read this story, remember that my much more subtle version ends at 'discount' and ignore the last few lines.