On reaching the end ...

Book News:

Fabulous news twice over on my Gathandrian Trilogy series: I've completed the final proof edits for The Gifting and sent those back to Bluewood Publishing so I'm looking forward to that one coming out in due course. At the same time, I've actually finished (yes, finished!) the first draft of the final part of the trilogy, The Executioner's Cane, which came in at 126,500 words, well gosh. I can't believe I've actually got a whole book I can edit and play around with at some stage. And now, having completed the story in full, it's surprising how very empty I feel, in spite of the fact that I've been longing and dreaming about this moment for months, my dears, months. I do still feel as if writing a whole trilogy is, for me, a huge personal achievement, but I swear I'm never going to write another one. Never, never, never ... But hell, I'm really going to miss thinking about those people, and the cane, and the raven, and, well, the whole dang thing actually. Lordy, but I'm confused. 'Twas ever thus.

Much to my delight, Brady's Choice was given a very nice review at Queer Magazine Online, so many thanks for that, Lena. And I'm also pleased to say that my lesbian erotic story, Butterfly Girl, has received over 1040 hits, which is lovely, even though nobody likes it much. Ah well. Mind you, this shouldn't come as a surprise to me after the latest comment on one of my reviews at Vulpes Libris where Gay Reader (Gawd bless 'em) tells me (in so many words) that I'm nothing but an envious, self-promoting, dried-up writer with neither heart nor soul, whose fiction is bland, flat and riddled with cliches, particularly in A Dangerous Man. I felt quite chuffed by those comments, and also impressed by the amount of passion and poetry in them. Mind you, as K says, does this mean I'm now set to win the Booker Prize? Oh goody! Anyway, my new strapline is now: bland, envious and self-promoting but served up with style. I hope you like the new improved image!

Here's some recent meditations:




Meditation 520
Hazzelelponi bears her syllables
with pride and despises
those with humbler names.

She has no need
of children to remember her by
and she walks tall

lifting her head
to the sun
whose warm rays

melt into her skin
and brand her
with a lesser glory.




Meditation 521
I remember Reuben:
I nearly played him once
at primary school
in Joseph

but was prevented
at the last minute
by a badly scheduled
hospital trip.

I’ve regretted it ever since
and forty years on
still have a rare sympathy
for this less important brother

where we share an understanding
of our place on God’s list
and taste the bitterness
of opportunity missed.


The Sunday haiku is:

When my chores are done
one pink shoe lies on tarmac
waiting for the night.

Life News:

Thursday at work was a heck of a long one, but that's always the case on the last day at work before Easter (as I'm on a University conference next week for three days). I got in at 8.30am and left at about 8.15pm. I worked like a Trojan and managed to get done everything I needed to, hurrah! Ah, the satisfaction of an empty desk has to be tasted to be believed, I'm telling you. Mind you, the sad thing was that, because of all that, I didn't manage to get to the performance of Annie Get Your Gun at Charterhouse theatre, starring Ruth's husband Douglas, which I was really sorry for - next time, I promise, both! And there was a hugely embarrassing moment at about 7.15pm when I went to the ladies, and then couldn't get back into the office as the security locks had activated. I had to go downstairs and get the security team, who laughed till they cried (and can you blame them!), to let me back in. Well, I do like to provide a certain amount of entertainment in the office environment now and again ...

Friday, Marian and I had a completely amusing game of golf and were laughing so much we could hardly hit the ball at all. Which may possibly have been a good thing. And it cheered me up greatly from the ongoing drama of our attempts to buy a house. Groan, and double groan. It appears that the lovely package of papers sent to our solicitor by the vendors' solicitors on Wednesday contains nothing but copies of what we've been sent before, and therefore our sixteen unanswered but actually very simple questions remain outstanding. No sign of any exchange date there then. We are therefore going to write one last firm email today, and send it to our solicitors, the selling estate agents and the vendors' solicitors, and if there's no movement by the end of this week, then we will withdraw our offer. It's a shame that a relatively simple process has been messed about so much by the sheer incompetence of the vendors' solicitors, but that is their look-out and not ours. In the meantime, we saw a very nice house in West End Village yesterday which will be empty in June as the tenants move out and the sellers are already living in Scotland, and that seems a very attractive option right now. Plus next week, while I'm away on conference, K will be checking out another couple of good options in Bisley, just to see the lie of the land.

Yesterday, we got away from it all briefly by visiting the Spring Garden Fair at Loseley Park, which was very pleasant indeed. And today we have done our bit for Palm Sunday (big palms! little crosses! all those great processional hymns! though, sadly, no donkey ...) and I've done some packing ready for tomorrow's trip. Golly, how organised I am. I've even managed to complete the ironing, triple gosh.

Tonight it's Lewis on TV, so a pretty good Sunday, really.

Anne Brooke