Friday, February 22, 2008

Torchwood oddities, girly golfers and a long slow edit

Finally Lord H and I managed to solve this week's "Torchwood" mission last night - but only by dint of Googling the answer, which made us groan when we saw it. Honestly we should have thought of that! I appreciate we may well now stand accused of cheating, m'dears, but if the TV Torchwood team can call up the great Martha Jones when they're stuck then I don't see why we can't ask the audience either, ha! The utterly strange thing is that the codeword we needed is the same as the codeword I use in Maloney's Law for a minor but essentially very key character. Weird indeed ... Lord H remains unsurprised that my head is full of aliens.

And talking of Lord H, he has just read the first page of Thorn in the Flesh and has had to put the book in the fridge and lie in a darkened room for a while. I fear to tell him that scarier fare is ahead ...

Anyway, this morning, I popped into Godalming to stock up on local essentials, including buying books for Mothers Day and bumped into my former churchwarden. There was a cowardly moment when I wondered if I should scarper before she saw me but, in the end, I screwed my courage to the proverbial and tapped her on the shoulder. Actually, we had quite a decent, non-judgemental conversation so I was glad I'd done it.

I've also played golf with Marian - lovely to get back to it after all the editing panics and holidays I've been having. Though I have to say it was a game of two halves for me. I basically phoned in a performance until the sixth hole when I finally got my act together. Phew! Still, I couldn't make up for the appalling nature of the first five so Marian still won. Darn it. Not something that happens often - I can see I shall never live that one down! At least not for a good long while.

For the rest of the day, I have been wending my slow but purposeful way through the edit to The Gifting - on page 397 now, so only about 60 or 70 pages left. Ye gods, there's hope, somewhere out there.

And the lovely Sharon Maria Bidwell has put a review of A Dangerous Man up on her website under today's date which you can access ... well ... by clicking on the lovely Sharon Bidwell. Thanks, Sharon - you can probably still hear the screams of delight from here!

Tonight, I was supposed to be seeing Jane W in London, but she's not very well, so we've postponed for a couple of weeks. Which means I'll be doing more to the Great Edit as there's sod all on TV. Oh, scrap that though - BBC2 has a ten-minute programme at 8.50pm about the beautiful parakeet - which is an amazing bird and you get them in the UK, hurrah, so do watch!

I must also say that I've just read Susannah Dunn's The Sixth Wife - which is the most inappropriate title ever as it's not about the wife; it's about her best friend. It's written in an incredibly calm and formal, though rhythmic manner, and for the first few pages I must admit I was groaning and wondering if I was going to finish it. But something really odd happened and I suddenly found I couldn't put the bloody thing down. At all. It's marvellous - and I suspect that most of the poor Amazon reviews for this just don't get it. It's a wholly unique style of writing but I loved it - it entirely suits the character, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk. Whom I also grew to love over the course of the book. Not because she's nice. She ain't. But she knows her own mind, she goes for the burn and she's got balls galore. That I like. I am now desperate to read another Dunn. Definitely an author for my list.

Today's nice things:

1. Sharon's review of ADM
2. Editing
3. Golf.

Anne Brooke
Anne's website
Goldenford Publishers

No comments: