Welcome to my perfumed garden

I've had an unusual morning; having decided (as I have) to make a fresh attempt at flogging my Great Unsold Novel again, as well as the bloody road book that's still basically unfinished (Well, it needs a few rough edges smoothing but I haven't the stomach for it until someone shows an interest - something they have, up to now, singularly failed to do).

I still feel the novel - a tale of a poor, lost soul who goes to Cuba to find The Revolution and ends up crapped on by CIA and Cuban G2 both (loosely based on bizarre personal experience) - is probably a better bet for eventual publication than the road trip book, so I thought I might as well hawk that round while I'm pimping the other.

So, I've been working on that this morning; finished a re-write of chapter one; 5,147 words. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought it might be, but the style seemed a bit choppy to me - just a matter of smoothing that out and editing a bit. There are 26 chapters so a chapter a day should see the thing right in less than a month.

I'm thinking of sending it to Andrew Lownie first - he expressed interest in my road book, but he wanted so much work putting into the submission I was put off. I've now discovered he's Terry Pratchett's agent and he seems to like journos; he has masses of the buggers on his books. So I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet on the excessive submission procedure and bang my novel at him first.

The rest of the day has been taken up with vacuuming the house and dealing with a British Gas engineer. These might seem two simple tasks, easily dealt with inside an hour, but his is my Mum and Dad's house where nothing is simple. I'll spare you the hideous details but, four hours later, suffice to say I now feel like my head is about to come off (if the aneurism/heart attack doesn’t kill me first).

I'm hoping to spend my afternoon on a run, a brief trip to Penistone to buy tea bags, writing a smidgeon of fanfic and working on this damn submission. Mum and Dad are safely ensconced eating salmon sandwiches and watching some Godawful thing on ITV. Who knows, if they stay this quiet, I might even get something done. Stranger things have happened, and not only at sea.