Track Santa!

Only 3 more sleeps till Christmas! Last year, around this time, I discovered http://www.noradsanta.org/ an highly unlikely by-product of the North American defence programme. Every year since the 1950s this organisation use their highly advanced missile satellite tracking technology for a much nicer purpose - tracking Santa's journey from his home in the North Pole as he delivers presents all around the world. The site is fascinating, even before Christmas Eve, as it gives away some very hi-tec secrets and insights into how the amazing man in red manages such an astounding undertaking every year. On Christmas Eve itself there are 20 minute updates on his progress from take off at 4am Eastern Time to landing 24 hours later, and sometimes video clips as he passes well-known landmarks. Hours of fun to keep overexcited children under some control! (that includes children over 30...) And then check out the wikipedia page for norad santa as well - you couldn't make it up!!

The photo is Leeds, 2 weeks ago. I suspect that is an escaping elf, not a child in the foreground...

Ho ho ho!

Jo x

Time for a wee whigmalerie?

The print copies I ordered have arrived and so I've launched 'Whigmalerie' onto lulu this morning. Copies can be downloaded FOR FREE by going to www.lulu.com/joannaduncan and clicking the download button and the previous two stories have made a reappearance there too. They're all free so there's no excuse not to indulge! They're best accompanied by a chunk of stollen or a couple of mince pies. (I'M SO MISSING CAKE!)

And just to make things a bit more interesting... One of my characters has a fondness for stage and screen musicals which, at moments of stress, shows up in his speech. Once you've read the story, can you say how many quotes there are in it from musicals? And can you name the musicals?? I'm warning you now - it's a tough challenge! If anyone gets half marks, I'll be impressed! THE ANSWERS will be here on December 24th...

Merry Christmas! Jo xx

Holidays are coming!

And the new Grouse and Partridge Christmas story - A Wintery Whigmalerie - is coming too! A bit longer than the usual festive offering, it weighs in at 55 pages and is the first G&P story to be written on the new laptop! It was completed in a record breaking 4 days and went to press last night.

It will be available from www.lulu.com/joannaduncan from December 17th - which is the day I break up for Christmas hols - as a TOTALLY AND UTTERLY FREE DOWNLOAD! Alternatively, you may purchase a print copy for £3.00. As usual, a donation will be made to CRISIS - a charity which supports homeless people all year round and especially at Christmas - for every copy downloaded or sold!

This year, I'm adding a little bonus feature in the form of a festive challenge... But no! I've said too much already!!! You're just going to have to wait until the 17th...

Where do you buy your books...?

I'm the first to admit I'm a biblioholoic: I can't stop buying books. I've been like this for years - I've always coveted books and once I started work a sizeable proportion of my income has been spent on them. Which is one of the reasons why I'm so sad at the news of the UK Borders going into receivership yesterday.

But it isn't the main reason. I visited the very first Borders in the UK the day after it opened with my best friend, who's a biblioholic too. We'd been to a Library conference in Reading and came back via London, just to have a look. She'd shown me the article in that week's Bookseller about the book-buying revolution it was going to bring about: I'd dreamed one day all bookshops would be like this - vast, stocked from floor to ceiling, filled with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, offering a dazzling array of media in every form. However, that day I was stolidly unimpressed. I remember as we emerged several hours later, like kids who'd had too much candy, that I commented about it being all 'pile it high and flog it cheap' and that there should be more to a bookstore than that... I can be a bit of a book-snob at times. It hadn't stopped me buying a couple of things though.

However, I was quickly won over. I even forgave them when they bought out the Books etc chain (which, to me, was the very best big bookshop chain ever!) Why did I soften? Well, like Mr Darcy's first comments about Lizzie Bennett, I realised I might have been a bit hasty. There was much that was lovable about Borders, not least the fact that it stayed open late and served wonderful coffee and sold books imported from America you couldn't get elsewhere.

Over the years, I've amassed a whole range of Borders memories from branches country wide, notably Birmingham, Glasgow, York, Central London, Islington on a peaceful summer's morning during the bomb scares of 2005, buying books with my 'team' at our local Teeside branch for the school library, and the two around Newcastle. Ben (one of the old 'library crew') and I used to spend lunchtimes fantasising about how you could spend an entire day in Borders and never need to leave. We had it planned like a military operation. Shame we never actually tried it...

It's not all pleasant memories, mind you. There was a Christmas shopping trip to York some years ago with a gentleman acquaintance which I thought might be the beginning of something beautiful but which ended up as something messily destructive. But even that had its up-side: it was in that Borders we both discovered Edward Gorey (and we both managed to stay entranced by him if not with each other!) and it was in my local Borders that I wept into a succession of cinnamon lattes and bored my long suffering best friend with all the angst he'd generated! She has her own Borders memories and reasons to mourn its demise...

Sadly, Borders has been a victim of that 'pile em high and sell em cheap' philosophy because Amazon and co do it so much better. And I hold my hand up - I've done it too - checked out a book in Borders and then gone home and ordered it on line (although I also have a strict policy of NEVER leaving any bookshop without making a purchase!) In recent years too, since the split from the US company, the choice of stock, presentation and promotion has sometimes left a lot to be desired. In August in Oxford Street we passed that former flagship store where they were holding a closing down sale and I wondered then about the future. Now it seems it's going the way of those other great loves of mine - Dillons, Heffers, Sherratt and Hughes, Ottakers, James Thin, Claude Gill, The Penguin Bookshops, Thornes, Mawson Swan and Morgan, Hills... all bookshops, all gone.

I was last in Borders on Monday night. I sank a Dark Cherry Mocha in Starbucks, bought a couple of books for work. There was an air of sadness about the place which was distressing. I read on the internet this morning the receivers have announced a huge sale - basically a closing down sale - with big discounts on the remaining stock. I love a bargain book. But I won't be going. I think I'd prefer to remember it as it was.

I've just bought my first Christmas present...

Although I don't feel in the least bit Christmassy yet! However, I've just realised that we've half way through November and I know from bitter experience that once we get to this stage of the year, the next few weeks will rocket by. I've spent a fruitless evening trying to order Christmas presents on line and having the website in question crash on me every couple of minutes! So much for e-commerce.

So I thought I'd reassure my vast readership that there will be a G and P Christmas story available from mid December as usual. It'll probably be the last installment of the saga for quite some time so keep watching this space to make sure you don't miss out. I'm not going to give anything away just yet, except that I've got to watch Brigadoon for research purposes...

Nice things this week: my favourite band Elbow were the subject of the South Bank Show last night which was fantastic. I've still got this week's Dr Who special to indulge in and one of my sources of inspiration for a certain Scottish detective made a public appearance in a kilt - sadly, I wasn't there to see the knees in person, but I've scrutinised the photos! (Don't bother asking for clues - you won't get any more! I shouldn't have told you this much!) Oh, and I've discovered I can get Dark Cherry Mochas in Starbucks with skimmed milk and no cream! Maybe Christmas won't be that bad after all...

My Guilty Indulgence...

Work has stopped. E-mails are going unanswered and I am ignoring the phone, the growing pile of washing up and the fact that I should be doing a dozen other things. Why? I started Ian Rankin's 'The Complaints' yesterday and I can't put it down! I'm devouring whole chunks of the book and resenting anything that pulls me away from the story! What is it about Ian Rankin's writing that sucks you in so completely that you just have to keep reading page after page?? I'm like a kid with an Enid Blyton! And yet at the same time, I don't want to finish it because then I'll have to wait for him to write another one before I can have this much fun again!

I envy him his seemingly effortless style (which I'm sure takes a lot of effort!) and his confident handling of material - he is a genius! (Haven't found any tressle tables in this one, but there's still half a book to go.)

Just spoils all other crime novels though...nothing else comes close!

Proof I'm totally stupid

As yesterday was Hallowe'en, I thought a view of the gravestones in the Burial enclosure in Inchbuie would be appropriate. This isn't my picture - I've never been on the island - but it's one I used to help me write the last few chapters of Scotch Pine.

It's the end of my week off and I can't say I've achieved a huge amount really. I've done some initial rewriting, sketched out the overall plan of this year's G&P Christmas story and built an office chair! My old desk chair was seriously in need of replacing: the back 'went' some time ago and my back has been going ever since. It was doing nothing for my posture or comfort. So today - which has been arguably the wettest day of the year so far - I went in search of seating. And I found a very nice, very comfy black chair which suited me perfectly. I bought it, brought it home and then started to put it together, only to discover that it only had one screw with it - and 1o were listed on the instructions.

To say I was furious would be an understatement. I'd checked the box was sealed before I bought it, and the fittings were in a sealed bag inside another sealed bag- there was no way they could've dropped out. In anger, (and resisting the call of a wicked bar of Aero which is living in my fridge and tormenting me beyond all reasonable bounds) I called the store I'd bought it from. My ire quickly dissipated, however, and turned to deep embarrassment when 'Chris' who answered the phone sighed heavily and informed me in a world-weary tone that the screws were already fitted to the chair in the right places - they just needed unscrewing and then re-fixing once the parts were in place...

As he was telling me this, my eyes fell on a line of writing above the diagrams on the instruction leaflet which informed me of the self-same thing. However, at least I'd only phoned up with my complaint: according to 'Chris' most people storm back into the shop carrying the half-built chair with them!

I'm sitting on the completed chair as I type. Very comfy it is too. Now, about that Aero...