Category Archives: Author Updates

I don’t know where to start this morning. Two cool things happened in one day on Sunday. Eee – fans hand in front of face – I’m all teary just thinking about it. The thing is, they’re so different I don’t know how to marry them up into a coherent blog post. Never mind. When have I ever let that sort of thing stop me? Exactly. So here goes.

First up, The Wrong Stuff has won an award and trust me, nobody is more surprised than me. As you can see I’m proudly displaying my new badge from Indie Book Bargains in my widgety bit. Please do have a look at the site or click here, and scroll down… a bit more… a little bit further ….annnnd there!

Whahoo!

That’s all I can say.

OK that’s the authory gubbins done… now here’s another important thing. Remember this post yep, that’s right, the cheery one. A few days after writing that I found out that one of my friends from school had had a heart attack and was in hospital in a coma – because life is always absolutely brilliant, around Christmas, isn’t it? The prognosis was not rosy although his Mum was convinced that he was going to make it and I have to confess that once I saw him, so was I. He is the most bloody-minded, pig headed person I know. Apart from me. I haven’t seen him for ages but he’s one of those people where that doesn’t really matter. My parents and I consider him pretty much family so I nipped home last weekend to say hello.

He’d made it to high dependency by that time and although he’d had a crap day the day before he was able to focus, communicate with blinks and he also managed the ghost of a smile and an eye roll when I told him he was the only person I know who is pig-headed enough to get better. He also managed an eye roll when I asked him if he wanted me to carry on holding his hand, seeing as my hands were disgustingly sweaty and covered in that gloop they make you put on them at the door (he blinked me a ‘no’ unsurprisingly). I left him some snurd cards – not that I’m an egomaniac or anything but actually, he’s a massive petrol head so he might like then.

Anyway come Sunday and his sister posts his picture on Facebook. He is sitting up, holding his head up and looking very lugubrious but also very much himself. Whatever the brain damage is, and we don’t really know yet, his intellect and personality are clearly undamaged. I would post the photo but he’ll fucking kill me when he gets better.

The link to writing…? Not a huge one, just that my current work in progress is not going well. In fact, it’s like pushing a giant rock up a hill but at the same time, while my normal cure for this would be to write something else, I can’t seem to leave this one alone. I suppose, when you know what you want to achieve, the steps towards it can seem very small and the goal a long way away. Perhaps the secret of attaining a difficult goal is not to evaluate your progress too often, or at least, if you do to look at how far you’ve travelled rather than the distance you have to go.

Over the past few weeks, it’s been hard to write in quantity because I’ve been worrying about people. And that’s fine. But it has occurred to me there are a lot of them in my life, right now, with much heavier rocks and much steeper hills than me. OR to put it another way, think I should really stop fannying around, get my finger out of my arse, and just write the bloody book.