Welcome to my perfumed garden

So why are we both so shattered?

Made an early start - moved all the furniture and gubbins out of the kitchen. Made a little workstation in the still-stripped-out sitting room so we can continue to eat and make tea while the kitchen's wet/dusty/manky/filled with noxious chemical fumes.

Went to bloody BIG! B&Q in Bamber Bridge this time for all our housely needs. Still couldn't get a light for the stairs though; their lighting designers really don't account for tall people living under low ceilings. ::sigh:: Side trips to Matalan and Aldi took us into rush hour but hey ho the nonny, we're home at last, showered, with cups of espresso, camped in the bedroom. I have cooked sauce for pasta so dinner is only ever going to be 10 minutes away. I has Steve Coogan and Richard Ayoade DVDs. There is chocolate and wine.

The Caroline Dawnay Agency email to tell me they don't want my book yet the most awful rubbish continues to get published. Am I the only person in the English speaking world that hates The Time-Traveler's Wife? I admit, I've only read the first eighty pages but so far it seems the most awful load of arse. The two main characters are so bloody unbelievable, so utterly, utterly perfect - He with his musician parents and erudite bookshelves, she, so tall and slender with her red-gold hair and pale skin and childhood home full of stereotype servants - she just screams Mary Bloody Sue to me and the style - the writing style seems so stilted and turgid; it reads like the author read some of the best pre-war authors and decided she could write a book Just Like Theirs.

I'm prepared to believe it gets better as the book goes on. It has to (doesn't it?) Because otherwise the glowing reviews that led me to read this tripe are just puzzling. I shall persist (though at the moment I want to fling the thing through a window).

La di da. Life continues to amaze me with its mysteries. I have Californian Shiraz, I have little crunchy, oaty things. I have cheesy crisps and damn fine comedy on DVD and a whole evening free to enjoy them. ::comforts self with this knowledge::
 

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.