I am not jet-lagged. Not in the slightest. This is because I have not been on a plane - the best I have been able to manage in the last couple of weeks is driving the car, but my feet are burning up to get out on the road, particularly a road with an expanse of some kind of ocean between where I am now and wherever it is I might be going.
Task of the day - find the holes in the rest of the year and nail those holes to the floor.
What can I tell you. The Family Of Noise is complete and I've handed it over to a trusted source to read it and maybe point out some sinkholes. This feeling of extreme love vs extreme amounts of hatred are not unusual apparently. I guess it will wear off in time - or as I suspect, get a lot worse as either a) the stakes get higher or b) nobody is looking at the stakes at all.
I spoke to the guys in Waterstones again this week and we got the signing idea back on the table for Black Dye White Noise - so what I'm going to do is nail down a date and get this show on the road - most importantly though, I think it needs to be more than a gentle author reading. It needs to be treated as something that people will go away from and talk about to as many other people as they can find.
Free cut-down samples of The Day The Sky Fell Down? Check. Yeah... that's a good idea.
Dates to come. You WILL know about it when it happens.
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One of the hard parts of this writing game is monitoring yourself and your output - or at least I find it hard. Cherie Priest regularly blogs her word counts for the day, or the week, and I sometimes consider that this might be a good idea for myself, but I'm not sure that I can actually be shamed into making myself feel guilty when a whole day goes by with no words being committed to paper.
Work on Misty Mountain Hop has begun (the rough title of my next one which does actually have a mountain in it, stolen - obviously - from the Zep song but that's where any similarity ends) so maybe I should try it out for a while and see where it gets me - but don't go being disappointed if I suddenly decide to ditch it as a spectacularly awful idea. Right now it would look like this:
Using this strange, ugly tool, by the time Monday comes around, it should look more like this:
But still I am not enthused even though 18% complete is a lot better than 8% complete. If I could stick to it, by the end of next week, by rights, it should be 25% complete and that sounds really good but hey... this is just pie in the sky. Let's see what happens.
I hereby promise I will try very hard to do this everyday and paste in the Ugly Bar (as it will now be known) - for the sake of experiment only, you hear!
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And now - even though it really, really is Too Hot For Dogs (I really should dig up poor, forgotten about comic book I started all those years ago), Mr H wants/needs to go to The Woods.
Let's do this thing and ponder jut how misty that mountain is as we stroll...