I wrote the cover letter and synopsis over the weekend, and now the work sample is on its way to the conference organiser - hopefully just in time to hit the deadline. The synopsis is a bit sketchy, especially towards the end, but since my only one-to-one is with a fellow writer rather than an agent or editor, I'm under a lot less pressure to make a stunning first impression!

Since sending off my sample chapter to the conference, I've been concentrating on worldbuilding for my Dreamwalkers project. In some respects, I don't have a lot to do because the world is based on heaps of previous projects, but on the other hand I have to decide which bits to keep, which to modify and which need inventing entirely from scratch.

These last few days I've been focusing on sorting out the names of countries. I have a couple that I wanted to keep, but the rest needed replacing. At first I thought of digging out my old notes and seeing if there were any other names I'd forgotten, but in the end I came up with a bunch of new ones, using a simple method. You see, an awful lot of European place names, especially on the continent, come from the Celtic and Germanic tribes who lived there before the Romans came along. So, all I had to do was to pick some tribe names and "warp" them in a different linguistic direction.