Friday 6 October 2006

Roll up, roll up! Excerpt!

New excerpt from Suite Seventeen... click here!

shout outs!

Just wanted to shout out to a couple of super people!

First... Jenny, who sent me a lovely email the other day, saying how much she liked my work and cheering me up on a day when I was full of doubts.

Secondly... Eliza, who is amazing, and she knows why! :)

Oh, and if I linked to you at my old blog, and you're wondering why there isn't a link to you at this blog... well, wonder no more! Just scroll down right to the bottom of this blog and you'll find virtually all the links from my old one. I also hope to be adding more when time permits...

a mixed day

Just what it says on the tin...

One of my royalty statements arrived today, and it wasn't quite as wrist slittingly piddling as I'd feared. Not much, but not so little that they simply sent the greengrocer's lad round with a bag of monkey nuts. Was reasonably satisfied... until started discussing royalty statements in general on a list I'm on... which caused me to look more closely at certain figures, and realise exactly how small a proportion of the price of a book the author actually gets. And how many books get 'returned'... Navy blue gloom set in again... and not for the first time, I started fingering my lottery ticket and chanting incantations. Was tempted to promise my firstborn to the gods of Lotto, but then remembered I don't have one...

So, back to paper editing my opus. Again, mixed. Some bits are okay, but I'm into an uncharted sort of region now. A bit of the book I've only 'written' and not worked over about four or five times. And consequently it's very rough, untidy, twittish and amateurish in a lot of places, and reads like it was a first draft of a first ever novel written by a poorly educated teenager. Oh, I think I'll be able to knock it into shape somehow, but it's going to need a couple more runs over this last 100 pages or so...

On the up side, the rampant indigestion and dyspepsia I've suffered for the last few days hasn't been so bad today. So at least that's in my favour... Wouldn't want to have bad guts over the weekend when Saturday is fish and chip night!