Work continues on The Family Of Noise - the end is in sight but it's still not finished. Books take a long time to write because unless you plan them out to within an inch of their life (which I don't), things change as you go along. I have read that some people plan, plan and then plan again but that's writing for money, not writing because it needs to be written. Just a personal opinion of course - but boy, can you tell when you pick a book up. As promised in the last newsletter (which you can sign up to here - it's so low key, you won't even noticed you filled anything in) the really short novella type thing I was working on called Scarecrow is indeed finished... and now it's complete, I don't like the title but that's easily fixed and I'll figure it out over the next day or so. First of all, I need to find an illustrator to bring it to life. I can't get to grips with a cover design for it either but that's because of the naming thing. Anyway, a few days and I'll be looking at doing something in the real world with it - assuming of course that the Secret Police don't go to town on me with a red pen - or even worse, the dreaded green pen. We have a system - it's harsh but it works.
I then need to make a judgement call on whether to release it as a 'regular' text only book or wait until I have the illustration angle figured out.
I think all of this may call for an editorial/publishing meeting on Saturday morning that involves a park, a dog and a bacon sandwich. I don't normally like meetings - they usually mean the person who is supposed to be in charge can't decide on what to do or they know exactly what they want to do and wish to give others the illusion that they have had some say in the matter.
This meeting will be over as soon as the bacon is gone and that's how all meetings should be run.
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A week or so ago, Eleanor set up a blog for Hector because she loves this turbo-powered hurricane of a dog more than life itself. Today, I tidied it up a little and gave it a lick of paint. If you're into good looking dogs who are busy growing up fast and laughing at their owners who are struggling to speak the same language, you know what to do.
Doing that has changed my mind about something. I'm still waiting on a response from WSPA about getting involved with freeing Baloo - man, they take a long time to do anything out there. If I've not heard anything by the end of next week, I'm going to walk away from even trying and throw my time and effort into something a little closer to home that might have something to do with much smaller creatures... file under pending.