Friday, October 20, 2006

Golf and shopping

Added a miniscule amount of words to the current scene of "The Gifting" this morning. I'm not getting very far at the moment, so am not too sure how the scene will go. It's a mystery - to me more than anyone ... the joys of writing, eh? Also entered a couple of competitions for this month - one poetry and one story entry - so the mechanics of the trade are ticking along, even if the guts are weak.

Still, I managed a pretty damn good game of golf with Marian today. Not only did I twice chip in from a great distance on a hole (hell, putters are so last century, darling), but Marian did exactly the same on the same holes. Synchronised golfing, here we come! And I parred the sixth - hurrah!

A health-orientated shop in Godalming has rounded off my day, though I've also been pleased by some positive comments from the Writewords (http://www.writewords.org.uk) site about the latest section of "The Gifting". And Lynn Michell from The Linen Press (http://www.linenpressbooks.co.uk) has kindly acknowledged my partial MS for "Maloney's Law" and says she sympathises with how difficult it is for good writing to get published nowadays. Well, that's cheered me up - of course, once she's read it, she may not want to see more, but at least she's being nice - which is a huge miracle in today's shit-nasty publishing world. Good Lord, what a fiery bloody furnace it can be.

Have just finished the second in my Booker Prize shortlist - MJ Hyland's "Carry Me Down" - though by "finished", I mean I got so bored a quarter of the way through that I started skipping huge chunks and then gave up entirely. I don't have any issues with unreliable narrators (hell, I write them myself sometimes ...), but does it have to be quite so dull? If you want a classy novel with a main character with mental problems, then my advice is to skip Hyland and read Mark Haddon's "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" instead. It's a million times better.

Today's nice things:

1. Golf
2. The message from Linen Press Books
3. Writewords' response to my upload.

Anne Brooke
http://www.annebrooke.com
http://www.goldenford.co.uk

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