The Acorn, a wiffle lever and some progress...

Excellent writing weekend - managed over 3,700 words and a substantial amount of editing. With a holiday from work approaching, I'm hoping to be just about finished by the end of April. At the moment, it's an unwieldy 340 pages so there'll have to be some trimming, otherwise cost and weight will be prohibitive! Left Hamish tied to a chair at the end of the session on Saturday. It ought to keep him out of mischief for the week... Music on the stereo for the last three days has been The Acorn's album - 'Glory Mountain Dreamer' which is gorgeous. They were support for Elbow when we went to see them a couple of weeks ago and they were really good, but the album is sublime - a bit like Fleet Foxes but more mellow, lots of banjo and guitar and some Penguin Cafe type rhythms. The words are heavenly. As for the wiffle lever...well, since January, I've been indulging in a childhood obsession, working my way through boxed sets of the BBCs 'Blakes 7' on DVD and I came across the intriguing 'Wiffle Lever to Full!' book by Bob Fischer which is funny and nostalgic and really made me smile last week. Bob Fischer has a brilliant blog - I'll find the link and post it - in which he is currently serialising his 1984 diary with 2009 annotations. If you were a child of the 80s or indeed a lover of tv sci-fi, please check it out! Best cake at the moment is probably Costa coffee's breakfast loaf which is packed with carrot, apples, sultanas and pumpkin and sunflower seeds. It feels very healthy which is just as well as the accompanying latte you need with it most definitely isn't!

Now the Ballet-hoo is over...

I'm settling back down to writing. We managed 6 performances in 4 days, plus various activities which the Friends of Birmingham Royal Ballet organise for our delight. It has been an amazing week but I am exhausted today! I can honestly say that I haven't given the novel a thought since last weekend and I am aware of time ticking by... So tomorrow night I'll get going again. (Best cakes this week were found in Starbucks. So were some of the company, which definitely made the cakes even tastier!)
Ballet has been an inspiration for poetry for about ten years although I've never really done anything with the poems I wrote. However, I'm considering 'lulu-ing' a slim volume of the ones I like the best, just for the pleasure of seeing them in print. Once you've published one book, it really does become an obsession. Maybe, once Scotch Pine is finished, I'll bite the bullet and have a go! BRB are an amazing company, talented and individual and so exciting to watch.
I'm also toying with replacing my beloved laptop. I've had it almost six years, some of the labels on the keys have worn off and several of the keys stick or need to be hit twice (strangely, P, M, and most of the vowels, but not E...?!) The battery hasn't worked for years. There's probably enough shortbread crumb under the keyboard to make an entire Petticoat Tail, and the cracked cover is beginning to resemble crazy paving. It's as slow as a tortoise working to rule, and it crashes at the most innopportune moments, but I love it dearly: we've been through a lot together and I have a (quite ridiculous and throughly sentimental) desire to finish SP on it. After that... well, maybe it's time to retire it!

That's better!

I've had a bit of time to play around with the settings and fonts and add a few bits and pieces: it's all very posh over here on this bit of the internet! I'm starting to feel quite pleased I've been forced to move! Still not entirely happy with the way things look so I'll probably keep fiddling about with it for a while until I work out what all the buttons are for! Have just checked and there seem to be about 22,000 bloggers who like Elbow on this site: I knew I was in the right place. Mark (book cover designer extraordinare) and I went to see them on Thursday in Newcastle - 3rd time this year - and we had a brilliant night. They're like sun-ray treatment for the soul! I've floated through the weekend, buoyed up by the experience, and was still so bedazzled on Saturday that I LOST A PIECE OF GINGER CAKE in a cafe! I had it when I left the counter but it had disappeared by the time I reached the table! All was not lost: a lady heard me wailing with grief and returned the absconding victuals which I'd put down to add nutmeg to my latte... It was all the more delicious for almost having lost it!

Scotch Pine news: I'm working on re-drafting at the same time as I'm writing. It's a strange experience. My 'editor' (who's had 2 eye ops and is waiting for a third!) has been brilliant and with her help I've managed to get 3/4 of the book just about ready for publication although there will need to be a bit of tightening up, inevitably, before it is ready to "lulu". The final few chapters are still in the back of my brain, in a sucession of little notebooks and on a dozen sheets of paper! At the moment I only seem to get Saturdays to myself, which makes it difficult, and next week Birmingham Royal Ballet are in Sunderland so I doubt I'll get anything done at all, since I'll be at the theatre each night! However, I am doing my best to ensure we have a publication date this spring. I'm determined! Planning an exclusive preview of part of chapter one in a few weeks time: I'll let you know when it's ready!

Best cake? Got to be the piece of Ginger Cake I thought I'd lost!!

A new home!

After blogging away merrily on http://www.lulu.com/joannaduncan for so many months, Grouse and Partridge were most distraught to discover that lulu had withdrawn its blogspot 'due to lack of interest'!! LACK OF INTEREST?? Not only that, all my cake recommendations of the last two years disappeared as well.
Now, I know no one ever read the blog (except you, SMF, and possibly even you, Colin!) but that's not the point!
I've got used to being able to randomly outpour the angst of self-publishing and the problems of juggling writing a novel with a full time job! And I was really rather pleased with my last posting! So, I've taken the plunge and here we are on Google! I'm not sure how it's going to work out - or even what we're going to look like yet - but please come back and keep up to date with the G&P chronicles as they happen! For now, I think I need cake...! Jo