Getting Down To Business With Descartes

I shall be starting work on the next 3 books from about July onwards.

While I am still overseas, I can do some work towards two other objectives.

One is to win a Writers' News short story competition. I can clearly do this only if I enter the competitions. I have already sent in the entry for the competition which has its closing date in mid-March. For the next one, due in mid-April, the brief is to write a story of 1500-1700 words, ending with the line "Out she walked with a spring in her step." I have no idea what I shall write yet but will be starting work on it soon. I frequently find myself in the position of sitting down to start a story with only a very vague idea of what the story will be about. Some writers have the whole thing sketched out before they start, with copious notes about plot and character by their side. Others fly more by the seat of their pants and I seem to be one of those. Something about sitting with my fingers on the keyboard seems to produce words in an order of which I had been completely unaware a few minutes before, with people taking shape and events happening almost out of my control. I hope that will happen again this time - and of a good enough quality to get to the top of the heap.

I had no idea I was going to write all of the preceding paragraph, for instance, just that I need to get cracking on the next story. It's a sort of mechanical verbosity, I suppose, rather than the audio version.

The other thing I need to do before starting on the three new books is to produce the paperback version of "Vic's Big Walk". Fortunately, I have a friend who has published through Lulu before and Gay and I have a one-week visit to England booked for June, partly to spend time with Peter preparing the paperback version. In the meantime I can correct the few typos and errors which I have been made aware of in the e-version. For instance, when describing my walk through the town of Descartes, I said that Descartes the philosopher had not made it into the famous Monty Python Philosphers Drinking song. I even checked the song to make sure I was right about this but must have been suffering from word blindness at that stage because I missed the obvious fact that he was indeed a drunken fart in the song.

I also mentioned at one stage that Jean Mortensen was the husband of Stanley. Only one person has pointed out that she was actually his wife.

Both of those errors, and a few others, will be corrected before the paperback goes to press.