Sold out

No, not me. God forbid. If that ever happens, please line me up against the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise and pull the trigger on an AK 47.

Apparently, my first edition has sold out in under a week. So my publisher says. To me, it's meaningless. I don't even know how big the first print run was (although I think 2k). Yes, it's going into a second edition - I'm the biggest-selling author my publisher has ever had, not that that's saying much. It's a tiny outfit with 3 staff (largely indifferent) and they've not exactly been proactive with promotion.

I still haven't even seen the book and I'm gutted I'll now never have 1st edition copies to sign and give to those few people who really matter to me.

I was so excited this morning and now I feel hollow. I rang one friend, my rock, but what I really wanted to do was go out and get pissed with mates but it was obviously not going to happen for a number of reasons. Ended up getting drunk solo, never a good idea. Now have to get up at stupid o'clock to catch a train to Birmingham for a networking/training day when I think I'd rather stay in bed.

Stacking shelves at Aldi suddenly looks very tempting...

Book news

The publishers are racing ahead with my book. The ISBN has already been registered with Nielsen, I've got to get a decent author pic for the cover by the start of next month and the publication date has been set (Spring, in case you are wondering). Oh, and there's the little matter of the deadline for my draft. End of 2008. Which means I have precisely 7 weeks to deliver a manuscript and I haven't started writing yet.

I need to get my skates on.

There's the little matter of finishing the other book project I'm working on, plus editing the MS for another author, plus all the other work I have taken on. Panicking? Me? Whatever gave you that idea?


PS: thanks for all the well wishes during my absence. It's good to be back!

Busy bee

Somehow I managed to finish the book proposal today. I drafted the bulk of it on Sunday and then wrote a draft introduction today of around 1,000 words. I'm quite pleased with what I've submitted and I'm confident it will pass muster with the publisher. They've already acknowledged receipt and said I will hear next week if I get the contract. Fingers crossed.

In between I've crammed in no less than 3 medical appointments - 2 check-ups and my flu jab. I also wasted 30 minutes waiting around in the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions, only to be told there is a supply problem for my epilepsy medication. Great. Now I have to go to another chemist tomorrow to collect half my tablets. The rest I can't get at all. I feel a rant coming on - time to pick up the phone and berate Big Pharma for putting me at risk of seizures if I can't get my meds...

I got a commission from a national newspaper yesterday so this afternoon and this evening has been spent researching and interviewing. My deadline is lunchtime tomorrow, giving me not a huge amount of time to pull it all together and write it up. Except I have to use that time to chase my meds at the other chemist as they will only hold the tablets until lunchtime. I sense a major conflict of interests approaching and probably a headache too.

The afternoon will be filled seeing my GP, again. And queuing at the hospital for routine yearly blood tests. I lead such an exciting life...

Woefully neglected

No, not me (although I could argue a case!) but this blog. I've had one of those weeks where I've been running around like a headless chicken.

I've finally signed off two writing projects, which means (I hope) that I can start preparing my book proposal for the publisher tomorrow. And also start the long task of cutting a client's book manuscript in half and knocking it into shape so they can present something usable to the agent and hopefully get a publishing deal.

I spent a large chunk of yesterday learning basic belly dancing steps. I should point out that this was in the name of journalism and bloody hell, but my back and abdominal muscles aren't half making their presence felt today.

It's also been a week of visits. A copywriter colleague dropped in for coffee earlier in the week and we had an enjoyable chinwag for an hour or so over chocolate macaroons. If things go according to plan, we may be working together before too long. Tomorrow, the last remaining parent drops by, the one I haven't seen for 13 months and with whom I have had only sporadic telephone contact in that period. Fortunately for both of us the royal visit is likely to last only an hour and may inspire me to pitch the event to a paper somewhere (although knowing my luck, said pitch would fall into the same black hole as all the recent others).

At least my mate C is arriving tomorrow to erase all memory of the parental drive-by. It's been a while since I last saw C, who is a high-flying scientist doing amazing things in a lab somewhere at the other end of the country. She'll be here for 24 hours and what we have in common (apart from being gorgeous and talented) is epilepsy. So my town can expect to see two pissed-up spazzers out on the razz tomorrow night, followed by the pair of us crawling around in dark glasses on Saturday as I attempt to show C the sights while we fight off our hangovers...

My Big Read

I'm painfully aware that this blog has been somewhat neglected over the last couple of months, what with moving house and stuff. I'm planning to post regularly again from now on.

In the meantime, thanks to Dougalfish (who got it from someone else) for the Big Read meme. It works like this. Over in the US, the National Endowment for the Arts runs a reading programme called The Big Read. Its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Here's mine...

Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 [Harry Potter series] - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (both versions - Torah and the King James)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four] - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (not read this but have read quite a few others by Dickens)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all, but many of the plays)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (vile, hated read. Yuk.)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 [Chronicles of Narnia] - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 [The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe] - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 [Animal Farm] - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (no way, not after abandoning Angels and Demons 3 chapters in. He can't write)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 [Anne of Green Gables] - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 [The Handmaid's Tale] - Margaret Atwood
49 [Lord of the Flies] - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 MISSING
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 [Oliver Twist] - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 [The Secret Garden] - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 [Notes From A Small Island] - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 [The Color Purple] - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 [The Little Prince] - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Why include this when the complete works is above?)
99 [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory] - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My score: 50/99. Not bad. There are some odd choices on the list - it's weird to see Dan Brown up there with Jane Austen. I'm bearing in mind this is an American list - doubtless if it had originated in the UK, my score would be a lot higher to reflect that I read a lot of contemporary UK fiction (especially crime fic). My classics were mostly read at school or university and I've read few since then. I've also read some authors I didn't bold because I'd not read the books listed but did read some of their other titles (such as Dubliners by James Joyce).

No. 51 was missing. I'd love to know what it was.

Books and newspapers

I came across Juliet Doyle's Musings from a Muddy Island blog the other day. It's a splendidly eclectic mix of posts on printing and typography, books, photography and art. My attention was particularly drawn to her post on why we keep books. I totally identified with Juliet on this - Wordsmith Towers contains thousands of books, about half mine, the rest my Beloved P's. Neither of us ever get rid of books. Well, I do very occasionally, but only the freebie chick-lit cover mounts from women's magazines that I tend to read just once then recycle at my nearest charity shop. Chick lit is not a genre I normally bother with, you see. I fear that we will run out of space eventually for our books. My office is full of dictionaries and other "work" books. Cookery books are in the dining room next to the kitchen. The main living room has books on entertainment (film, rock music, soaps), exploration and geography, and history. The other living room is crammed with general fiction, crime novels, travel guides and maps. The spare bedroom contains P's sci-fi and fantasy novels. Our bedroom has shelves of erotica. The landing is shelved with politics and Judaica. And, well, you get the picture...

Books are my friends. I have favourite books I return to again and again, and books I read only once but will never part with. I grew up in a house crammed with book, was reading before I went school and cannot imagine having no books around me. I guess it explains why I chose the career I did. An ex of mine never read and I remember how shocked I was when we first met to discover that he owned just 6 books, 1 of which was the telephone directory and 2 of which were car repair manuals. When we moved in together he grumbled about the size of my book collection and banished all books from the living room. You can see why we were doomed...

I love looking at other people's book collections too. It can tell you masses about the kind of person they are, just as their wardrobe and CD collection will.

If you're quick, go to Radio 4 right now. The Beeb is running a series of very interesting programmes on journalism and newspapers. I'm having a lazy Sunday here, indulging in a marathon listening session to catch up on some of the programmes I missed earlier due to work pressure.

Invisible

Where's the "embarrassed" smiley? I just realised it's been 20 days since my last post and am shocked at how the fast the days have blown by. So what has this wordsmith been up to?

Work, mainly. It all got a bit hectic in late September and it carried through into this month. Before I knew it, it was mid-month and I'd been silenter than a silent night. Tsk! Unusually for me, as well as churning out words I've been donating them. I agreed to be a case study for two features by other hacks. One of these is published today, so I will shortly absent myself to purchase said magazine. Trips to the newsagent are becoming more frequent these days - yesterday saw me buying a downmarket interiors mag which carries an article by me, for example.

I also came up with a great idea for a book - I need some time to formulate it and get some advice on how to pitch it to a publisher, but I think it's a definite goer.

Talking of books, the very splendid Linda Jones, freelance journalist extraordinaire, is launching her book today. I will shortly be hopping on a train to support her at the launch (and buy a signed copy, of course!). Expect a report later this week...

Freelancing - how and why

Journalist Linda Jones, a freelance I greatly admire, has been writing a book on being a freelance writer. More to the point, the book is full of top tips on being a freelance writer in the most productive way possible. It's not out yet, but I hope to be at the launch on 4 October. In the meantime, place your orders through Linda's site because you won't regret it if you are a freelance writer, aspiring or experienced...

It's obviously a week for dispensing info on freelancing. An editing colleague of mine has been picking my brains on how to break into earning money from writing. It's not easy and you need to be persistent as well as know what you are doing.

I also had my attention drawn to this list of 101 Reasons Freelancers Do It Better, which has just been published. It's an interesting list and hard to disagree with most of the 101 reasons, although some seem to be duplicates (eg, reasons 7 and 42 are virtually identical, as are 55 and 56). Some of the reasons are questionable - take no. 44, for example. I do take issue with this. A lot of freelance work can be very boring even when you are freelancing in the profession you love. If you agree to edit a 600-page book on a subject you have no interest in, you will get bored very quickly, no matter how much of an enthusiastic pedant you are. I had just such a book recently (the MS From Hell), when it was really hard to sustain my interest, but to be fair, it was less due to the subject matter than the incompetence of my client that caused me to lose interest.

On the whole though, this list gives a pretty fair picture of the realities of what you'll be dealing with as a freelance (whatever your trade), even though it tends to portray everything as a positive, including what I call the shit jobs, such as doing the books - no one will ever convince me this is enjoyable!

If you're thinking of turning freelance, having a look at the 101 Reasons will give you a first grasp of what working for yourself entails. And if you're planning to write for money, buy Linda's book. It could be the best fiver you've ever spent.

My media

Inspired by Linda Jones's media diet over on Freelance Writing Tips, here's mine.

Press: I'm too lazy to buy papers these days, except for the weekly local rag. I read the Guardian and Observer online, plus the BBC news online. I surf the online tabloids only if I have time and am bored and in search of some celebrity gossip. I also buy several magazines every month - usually BBC Good Food, Eve, InStyle and New Woman (the latter strictly for the fashion pages). I rarely read the trade press, except for my free copy of Editing Matters, published by the SfEP. I also like How Do, for its coverage of north-west media, which is after all on my patch.

Blogs: I read quite a few. I always enjoy reading what Craig McGinty has to say about the media. Likewise, I read Linda Jones on her various blogs. She is a highly experienced journalist and has great insight into the media, plus a sharp wit. Sally at Getting Ink is also very insightful and funny. I also follow Belle de Jour and The Girl, because they are the two best sex blogs around and utterly addictive. I surf around to read others occasionally.

Web: I use the web every day when working. Wikipedia is useful for fact-checking and research, as is Google. I have bookmarks for many other sites I use regularly, either for work or personal stuff. I shop online for books and other stuff and I belong to a large number of forums that reflect my personal interests.

Networking: the internet is so useful for business networking. I belong to several business forums - good for discussing business issues and occasionally finding work. I have a presence on MySpace, but can't be bothered with Facebook, Bebo and the rest. I also use LinkedIn but have yet to exploit it to the max. And, of course, there's the quintessential JournoBiz.

Phone: I hate the phone.

Skype: another essential. I rarely use the phone, but the chat facility is very useful for my overseas clients, especially for exchanging files. I also chat to friends via Yahoo.

Email: an essential tool given that 99.9% of my work arrives and leaves by email. As soon as I get up, the first thing I do after making my pot of tea is to check my inbox. Then I carry on checking it regularly throughout the day until it's time to sleep. Addict? Moi?

Gadgets: none. I can't be doing with Blackberrys and the like. My mobile phone is the one concession I make and even then it's switched off most of the time and only used when absolutely essential.

Books: life would be tedious in the extreme without books. Naturally, I have a ridiculously huge collection of dictionaries and reference books - tools of the trade. For relaxation, I love crime fiction, particularly gory serial killer thrillers. The gorier the better. I also enjoy biographies, particularly of bands I grew up with the late 70s/early 80s. I have a large collection of books on The Clash, for example. I also read a lot of history and politics. I must read in bed at night, even if it's only for 5 minutes before switching the light off.

TV/radio: I watch very little TV. I rarely watch the news as I read it online, but I occasionally tune into BBC News 24 if there's a major breaking story. Otherwise, I always watch EastEnders, Doctor Who and Torchwood when they are showing, and I enjoy a good drama series too. I used to listen to Radio 4 all the time 20 years ago, but these days only tune in for The Archers. I find daytime radio distracting when I'm working and I hate missing out on so many good programmes but it's just not practical anymore. My bedroom radio is tuned to Radio 2 - I love Wogan and Jonathan Ross.