Back to the battle, a gay solution and a competition prize

Still getting there on the health front today, slowly slowly. A lot of coughing and snorting - in fact I'm thinking of applying for a job as an old horse, should one be up for grabs anywhere. Really, I'd be brilliant. We've also been continuing to laugh a lot at MPs. Such joy to know that the criminals are all safely gathered in one place: Parliament. Ho hum.

We're also smiling at the Church Times which, as always, manages to grab the last word on the religious issue of the day - in response to the recent appalling news about the London conference encouraging homosexual people to be "turned straight" (Lord preserve us from such idiocy, we cry ...), one of their literature-focused columnists suggests that in fact the world would be a lot more pleasant and far more moral if there was a programme to turn us all gay - then Macbeth would have shacked up with Duncan rather than murdering him, Jane Eyre would have managed to talk Mrs Rochester down from the roof and Romeo would have settled down happily in Verona with Mercutio. There's much to be said for it indeed - where do we all sign up??

Meanwhile, I've finally got myself back into writing more of Hallsfoot's Battle and am now at 118,500 words. Mind you, I'm getting hugely twitchy now and I just want to (CAPITALS DELIBERATE) GET THIS DANG FIRST DRAFT FINISHED and have a bloody good lie-down. Please??? I'm sooo nearly at the end of the wretched battle scene, then I have to finish the mopping up, get Simon, Ralph, Johan and Annyeke in the places where they should be and I'm done. Honestly, it's as if I can glimpse the finish line in the distance, but the sweat in my eyes is meaning the whole damn thing's a bit blurred and I'm not sure I'll get there in one piece. Or, more accurately maybe, it's like a piece of classical music Lord H and I were listening to on the radio a few days ago where just as you thought they'd played the final chord, there was another ... and another ... and then another. And only THEN was it over. Writing the end - or trying oh so desperately to write the end - of Hallsfoot is hugely like that. Goddammit. I'm tired, I've had it up to here and I need to start something else. Soon.

But there's more positive literary news too, thank the Lord. The lovely people at First Edition Magazine are offering a complete and signed set of my novels as a competition prize in their June edition - which is out now in WHSmith's, hurrah! My name is even on the front in a big red circle, so that's lovely. I'm just hoping and praying that some kind people out there might actually enter the competition (the answers are easy and can be found either in my interview in the May edition or on my website, hint hint ...) -as the humiliation if nobody enters and they have to ditch the books or (worse!) send them back to me doesn't really bear thinking about. Though of course I am doing nothing else but thinking about that scenario, sigh ...

Tonight, I'm gearing myself up for the joys of Primeval and then we must watch as much of Eurovision as we can bear. The honour of the country, don't you know. Ho ho. It won't be the same without Sir Terry however - and I really don't think much of that dreadful UK entry. I tried to listen to it on YouTube earlier in the week and could only manage about 30 seconds without losing the will to live. So, bearing in mind the undoubted influence of my cultural opinion on the music (or indeed any other) business, that probably means the damn thing will be an outright winner. Lord preserve us once more.

Today's nice things:

1. Church Times articles
2. Limping to the finish with Hallsfoot, slowly
3. Being a competition prize - at last, at last!
4. TV.

Anne Brooke - aiming high at nul points ...
Cancer Research Race for Life - all donations very gratefully received