I have to say that, so far, the themes that the readership of this blog and I came up with, seem to have congealed into interesting issues. Sure, some themes cause me to go bald with worry about appropriate photography, but I seem to be genetically pre-disposed to be sparse-haired anyway.

Sometimes when you're laying out the contents of a magazine, it appears you have an extra page. The usual quick 'n dirty solution is to insert one of your own or a charity ad. Or perhaps there is a good photo that can be enlarged to fill a page. The latter especially is not a bad solution, but I´m thinking of something new.

As you may or may not know, getting good quality illustrations for our articles is a constant concern for me. Simply put, I can illustrate Roman imperial stuff forever and a day, but when it comes to Roman Republican soldiers, Alexander's troops or, dear me, those wonderfully interesting Successor armies, it's another story.

For a while now I've been thinking about the themes for 2009. Some seem obvious. There's doubtless going to be a plethora of books and articles about the Teutoburg forest, but I'm confident that our angles and take will be deeper and more original than what's usually served up.

Many authors ask me what I'd like them to write about. Personally, I think that's making it a little too easy on yourself. It's clever, because it'll be hard to refuse an article if I've asked for it first, but maybe not the kind of clever I'm looking for. So here is a list of some of the things I look at when I get an abstract, translated into a series of do's and don'ts.