Coming Together...

SLOWLY... SLOWLY I get this feeling at long, long last that my life is finally starting to come together.

Spring is springing...

The writing project I'm doing is turning out well...

I should hopefully be getting my own computer soon, which means I'll be back online at home ...

... and able to post more than once every blue moon...



MUSIC: PPK RESURRECTION
I have wanted to post this up for so long ~ yet not known the name of the track ~ and PRESTO up it pops at random from youtube this very afternoon...

Sweet Summer Rain

IT'S STILL "lovely and summery" here in London. I've been writing as much as I can.

Even when depressed and "wading through the honey of life" I am still pressing myself forward.

And, when you think about it, wading through honey is better than wading through shit!

Still Writing...

I'VE FINISHED HALF A BOOK. Half a short book. (I'm talking about the rewrites. Version one is finished and lying in a ringbinder as we speak...) WH Smith's refill pad by hand and now it's less of a mess (but I STILL keep remembering little lose ends not tied up... y'know... very annoying).

All this bluster and puff from me about how I "don't want to self-publish" ~ now I'm spending most of my time wondering whether the local supermarkets will take mine in hardback... etc. If I AM gonna print it up myself I definitely want it in proper hardbacks. Even just a tiny print run of 500. Then I'll go round every WH Smiths, bookshop and supermarket in every part of London saying I'm a "local author" and would they take just 25 copies (surely that's not very many, for a future classic of world literature, is it?) Hmmm.

WH Smith, by the way,  is a news agent, stationers and book shop. In many UK towns they're the ONLY book shop left ... What do people do in foreign counties where there's no WH Smiths? Not read or use Amazon, I suppose...

Oh did you know I used to live in a REAL garrat and I DID write a novel when I lived there. I still have the handwritten pages in £1.99 A4 exercise books.

It's not very good though. And it's FULL of drugs. Ukh.

I'm getting my computer fixed soon. So I can be a "professional" writer! I will let y'all know when that happens!

Got to go. I spend every waking hour editing or thinking about editing. (TV blaring away in the background, of course. How very professional of me.)

Once this one's finished I have plots of NINE MORE TO GO!!

Cereal characters: doncha just love 'em!

BTW was I very miserable and depressed last time I posted? I sounded it. Been sleeping 12 hours flat every night, Going to bed at 5am getting up at 5pm. Last night I popped a humungous dose of antipsychotic to knock me out early and was up at 7:30am! You see, legal drugs do have their uses!!!

Illustrated: not my MS but (allegedly) part of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit

I've written (a rough version of) a (very short) intellectual book!

THE BAILIFFS ARE OFF MY BACK. I hope. I had to go through an Eastern-European potato-rationing queuing system to see a kindly black lady at the council with artistic fingernails.. She told me that because an arrangement to repay my council tax arrears had been made by the council, complete with instalment plan (starting next week) the bailiffs had been called out in error and just a click of her mouse would (supposedly) send them e-packing (I hope!)

Oh and I've finished my intellectual children's book. It's not that long. (About as long as a Famous Five book, if you know those (Americans don't seem to have heard of Enid Blyton, which is weird. Or maybe not. She's about as British as cricket and rain.)

According to Wikipedia, Enid Blyton's 800+ books have sold over 600,000,000 copies. So I hope a bit of her luck rubs off on me!

So now I'm due to hack through this intellectual "MS" of mine (as us intellectual writers call it) and turn it into something printable. Considering my novel is for the under-12s, do you think I'll have to take out the lurid 10-page sex scenes? O I'm just kidding. Really they're 12 pages long ha har!.

Do you know my friend Liz, who is always going in and out of prison, so she must have something decent to write about, (OK, fair dinkum, she does work there) but anyway she sent her intellectual novel to 25+ literary agents, before ending up self-publishing. How very inconvenient!

Did you know an advance for a children's book can be as small as £2000 ($3213.24) so I'm going to have to save up loads of these books and submit them all at once... (Do you think?) Ukh, I don't know anything about the publishing business. Is it true the book business is supposed to be on its last legs? If so, how come EL James has managed to flog 70,000,000+ books in the last year or so? She was said to have sold 45,000,000,000 copies in just three months this summer! Is that really true? (They do say publishers' biggest fictions are their own sales figures!)

OK well I have to stop thinking about this stuff and just hope I ever manage to get in print at all! I wonder if anyone will wanna read my stupid tales? You know I have so many "literary ideas", at the present rate it would take over TEN YEARS to pen them all! I'm serious!

Anyway I've gotta go. Take care everybody. PS I'm hopefully getting my computer fixed. Soon!

Illustrated:  the field of children's books is crowded out by "celebrity" authors. From top: Sarah, Duchess of York; footballer Frank Lampard; my fellow blogger Liz's book; Madonna with a book she wrote and got a million-pound advance for (wonder if anyone actually read it)...