under another sun

My essay on waiting was unplaced in London Magazine's essay competition. Not too sore about this as I had to rush for the deadline, and having reread it lately I thought the conclusion was weak. But you have to give things your best shot at the time. Contacted my pals in Chiswick, and it seems the prospect of any more work this month has melted away due to general quietness. It seems the poos and kidneys work was just a flash in the pan. I recontacted the folks in Paddington who had offered me some work last week. I did not hear back today either. All this did was prove the requirement for steady nerves and iron discipline. I remained buoyant. Wrote to my accountant, retaining his services for the year, and sent some poems into the rejectosphere. Downloaded the updated Scrivener, as it was unsupported on Apple's updated OS. I had bought Scrivener through the App store, a schoolboy error, as the billionaires at Apple will make you pay the full price again, despite them m...

Getting down to the MS again this morning, again feeling what a boon Scrivener is. A quick chat with Toby via messenger, a conversation with a colleague about tweets, but otherwise working fairly steadily. A walk in the afternoon off to see Janet and Ken, listening to the C.S. Lewis biography.   They are hoping to move house in a month or so. Janet had just found out the place they are moving to is in some need of electrical work, but she doesn't begrudge this too much as the house was had at a good price. Ken looked well, and cheery and sitting in his usual chair, much improved from a spell when he was prescribed antibiotics that didn't agree with him, nor proved necessary. Home and cooked, and spoke to Mum this evening. Beth home tonight, having done the first real show (which went down excellently) and pausing afterwards to drink some peach schnapps and lemonade with the cast afterwards in the trusty Crown and Anchor.  On the way to Janet and Ken, some scr...

Working on my Skelly MS, and revelling in the boon Scrivener is to getting things done quickly. Feeling tired, but I had my head down all day. A man came and measured up the door again, for we are replacing this as it doesn't really fit. It is going to have our house number on the glass above the door. That will be nice. I like the number 11. It is a bit mad to have favourite numbers, but along with 5, 11 is one of them. Symmetry is key. Otherwise not much going on. I cooked a turkey based stew tonight, using some substantial stock I had made with the Christmas turkey and had frozen.  A walk along to the Five Ways to buy an enormous leek. Of such stuff is the life of a genius cobbled together. Lorraine in need of TLC back from work today, which I supplied via the medium of turkey-based stew.

So up early, thanks to Lorraine bringing breakfast up to our room. A thorny, first-week School problem for Lorraine which we discussed over porridge. Lorraine then made off for work and I got up. I have decided to rework my Sketlton Yawngrave novel in the next few weeks (traditionally a quiet freelance time of the year), as I have been stealthily rethinking it for a while now. To this end I bought and downloaded Scrivener, and spent much of the day learning how to use it. From my initial assessment it is going to prove incredibly useful. It is software designed for longer writing projects, but helps you organise everything much better. The trouble with a long project is that it is a bit like looking at an elephant in a hut, through a hole in a wall. You can see bits of it, but never the whole elephant. This allows you to see the whole elephant at the click of a mouse, through a system of synopses, character boards and so on. In fact everything I've had to think about. You can upl...