Friday, December 01, 2006

Shopping, visiting and - ye gods! - some writing ...

A day of recovery, after the mad social whirl of yesterday. I have to say the Goldenford (http://www.goldenford.co.uk) evening at the Barclays party was pretty good - and I even sold one copy of "Pink Champagne and Apple Juice". Miracles still happen! Which brings my grand total of November to four copies sold. Hell, it's not JK Rowling, but no complaints so far ... And not only that, but the Golden Gals all managed to sell a copy of our books - and we even got Jennifer to read from "The Gawain Quest", her upcoming novel (which is a really top-class read, but for some reason she doesn't see it - sigh ...). Triple miracles then. And I met James - Lord H's old and very adorable boss - at the do, so it was good to catch up with him. He disappeared before I could bloody well make him buy a book though - bad show, James, damn it.

Today, I did some critiques on the Bewrite (http://www.bewrite.net) and WriteWords (http://www.writewords.org.uk) sites, and then actually did a couple of hundred words to "The Gifting". Ye gods, I can still write - of sorts; it was a bit of a struggle, but at least I have some inkling of how I'm going to end the scene I'm on. Phew. This afternoon, I had a wonderful two hours' nap - Lord, how I needed that - then whipped round Godalming, catching up on shopping essentials before visiting Gladys rather later than anticipated. Mind you, this was something of a party, as her neighbour, Maureen, and carer, Bea (or "B"? - I've never got to grips with the spelling ...), were also there, so it was party time for the old folks. Or folk, to be precise.

Oh, and driving back from one of my jaunts out, I saw a man walking down the road carrying a rather large mattress. The plot thickens here - as for the last week or so, there's been a complete bed frame left on our downstairs neighbour's front garden. I almost stopped and asked the mattress-man if he was looking for a bed to put it on, in which case ... but decided this probably wouldn't be a good conversation to hold with a stranger. Under any circumstances! It's also funny how none of our two fellow flat-dwellers are talking about the bed on the lawn. I've assumed it's one of theirs, but perhaps they think it's us, and everyone's being too polite to mention it?? Maybe in ten years' time, when it's still there, someone will crack and we'll discover that it's a total stranger's bed that's been dumped on us, and we can get rid of it after all. Till then, we'll carry the stamp of inner London fly-tipping in the midst of leafy Surrey ...

And I've just given up on Paul Coelho's "The Fifth Mountain" as a bad job. Please, mainstream authors and publishers, when oh when will you bring something on the market that's good enough to finish?? Quality seems to lie only in the small presses' hands at the moment.

Today's nice things:

1. Napping!
2. The man with the mattress - which made me laugh
3. Managing to squeeze out a few words of the novel.

Anne Brooke
http://www.annebrooke.com

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