Thanks to a couple of interruptions - I have brought The Eternity Ring to an end. Now it's complete and ready to roll, I'm going to start pushing forward with plans to see if there is interest in releasing an illustrated version. I can't promise that will ever happen though so if you think you might be into it, don't hold your breath waiting for an alternative version... do you know how long an illustrated edition of something takes to come out even when there are big guns behind it and some money thrown into the pot. Then again... maybe that's the problem. File under pending. Anyway - I'm most pleased with it. I've never tried writing anything for children that's really for adults pretending to be children before (or possibly the other way around) - if you want to throw some feedback around, you know where I am but I'll also leave the comments open on the bottom of its own page so that you can throw stones in public if you wish. The whole shooting match will go live in the next couple of days (as I write it's been shipped out to the editing/proofing guys for crash testing) and that makes me happy.

What next? Well, for a couple of days I have a magazine to put to bed, then I intend to redesign and rebuild said magazine and alongside of that, I'm sweeping the table of all writing projects to get a final draft of The Family Of Noise under my nose... all writing projects except The Day The Sky Fell Down that is - which is more of a 'broken' style thing and currently has some momentum. Those are my two aims for the next few weeks.

Yep - I am addressing my biggest weakness of being able to focus. Let's see what happens.

•••

A couple of nights ago, Rhiannon was showing me a song she was learning for a music assessment at school. What it came down to was basically learning - parrot fashion - how to play Mad World on a keyboard. This she did - pretty damn impressively - by using a free app on her Nexus. Inspired by her slave like devotion to the app and getting the job done, I thought to myself "How hard can it be?" because there's something pretty damn cool about coming across a piano when you're out in the world, sitting down and banging something out for the people just because it's there.

So I added myself a task to the Day Zero project. In at number 79 with a bullet: Learn how to play a Harry Nilsson version of Without You (previously proclaimed 'the best song of all time' somewhere in the annals of this blog). It's very specifically one of Harry's versions that it has to be though. He was the one that brought it to the table and made it sounds like a woman had taken a sledgehammer to his soul. There have been other diva versions since, but for those, the song is nothing more than a platform to use to show how much range you can pound out.

No: the Nilsson version it must be. There are tutorials for everything on YouTube, so right now I'm working through them and trying to figure out which is the best. I figured the best way to do this, being as I don't play piano and never have, would be to take a 12 year old's approach to it and simply copy until it sounds right and then I'll figure out how to clean it up and add some sparkle to it. I have no doubt that playing it will be hard enough but then I'll need to add the vocals and that will be another adventure altogether...

Whatever happens, it's a nice distraction from writing. Not that I need one, but sometimes it's good to do something for no other reason than because it's there.

Here's Harry (audio not video) - I love this demo version. It's raw in the extreme and that's how it's got to be.

It's that time of year again. The time of year when I make a valiant attempt to plough through as many books as I can in the face of an ever mounting drift of festive tomfoolery. Actually, does anybody remember that show? It was the sort of thing they ploughed out on TV during a Sunday afternoon between a bout of Tex Avery and Walter Lantz while adults got on with grown up chores like mowing the lawn or cooking, thinking it would keep us amused - and they were right! Oh, how easily us children of the 70s must have been to keep occupied and out of the way as suburbia revolved on its axis.

Whatever happened to cartoons on TV? I can't remember the last time I saw a Tom & Jerry, a Droopy or a Mister Magoo cartoon. Here's a reminder - and it's a classic:

Lost my train of thought there. Next on the reading list after STONER (which is so damn good, I've already bought another three copies to hand out to people that I think will appreciate them - so much for not buying any more books huh) is this:

I like a good rock n roll story, particularly when it comes from the early years of the band I worshipped on my knees for far too much of my life. The three years that this book covers and maybe a couple more tagged onto the back end up until maybe 1977 are all I need from them. I'll have finished it by tomorrow so luckily, sitting right next to it in the shelf is this:

And if you can't tell what it's about from the cover alone, you came to the wrong place. Sheesh - all you have to do it read that big round sticker type thing and that's it in a nutshell. I don't give that much longer than 24 hours either to be honest. I might review this one properly.

And then? I'm not sure where to head next, probably back into something hefty and story-like. Maybe a book from somebody who's doing nothing more than wandering around the avenues and alleyways of the world with their teeny-weeny finger curled - and ain't that Thomas O'Malley theme from The Aristocats one of the greatest movie soundtrack songs of all time? Let me see if I can find it...

I wish I had a theme tune like that. Perhaps I should change my name instead?

•••

I've made it sound like I've been doing nothing but reading and watching crap on YouTube but that's not true! No Sir. Wrapping up the first edits of The Eternity Ring here which I'm really pleased with but I now need to throw it in a drawer for a week to get some editing distance 0n it. Also made some serious impact on The Family Of Noise as well but tomorrow I'm in full author mode to see exactly how much of that I can nail down.

There's nothing but a small (though getting bigger) dog standing between me and success on that front.