Morris trolley 1

X-ray results through: not good. David will have to go into hospital for investigation, which will involve removing the pins in his hip-joint because he has necrosis. What he's most dreading is the food in the BRI!
No writing done this week because of family/friends' health problems -- putting it down to research. The picture is supposed to go in the my profile section, but I can't get it to post there. I'll keep trying.

Shakespeare and his cheese sandwich

Back from Buxton (5 days ago, actually) with severely depleted finances and worrying family news.

Our friend Chris came over from London returning the pictures he took to try to find a buyer; no interest there apparently. David's idea is to take them to the museum here, as they are both local scenes of a sort. But the museum doesn't buy pictures, or anything at all, it seems.

Photographed David's 2 Staffordshire pot dogs, flower-sellers spill-holder and W Shakespeare with his cheese sandwich (actually a book he's leaning on). Dogs are badly cracked and WS is crazed, so we won't make our fortunes that way! But we now have something to show the auctioneers.

David rang his doctor to see if his x-rays had come. The doctor rang back to say there was no record of his having had an x-ray, despite the fact that we'd gone to the Bristol General with a pink form, and the deed had been done. Dr Burlington will now administer a bollocking to the BGH. We will wait patiently. No pun intended.

I rang the bank and saved the bacon, for a while.

While we were out shopping in the cool of the evening, Dr Burlington rang to ask David to make an appointment to discuss his x-rays. So the bollocking worked.

"What of the writing?" I hear you cry. Mmm.

We're all going on a Summer holiday...

...no more blogging for, well, the rest of this week, anyway.

And the lovely Lesley-Jayne didn't come. So we drank the wine we had and went shopping for the journey. And packed. And went.

No lemmings, Lesley's coming, take to the hills!

I got right through level 1 of Lemmings, and now I get the message

FORBIDDEN
You don't have permission to access /scripts/lemmings/html/preload.html on this server.

So no excuse for not writing.

I read somewhere that you should have more than one short story ready before you start submitting anything for publication, in case the publisher says "Your story is not for us, but do you have anything else?"

I've submitted one short story ("Silly Boys") to a magazine; started another one, which turned into a novel; and another, which turned into a TV drama script. Oh, and I started the sequel to "Silly Boys", which will only be useful if "Silly Boys" is accepted for publication! So I'm still in need of a short story.

One plan is to write the TV script, "A Fighting Chance", simutaneously as a short story. This means going back over the script and converting it to prose. Should be an interesting exercise, and should keep me busy during our holiday in the hill country. (We're going to see our parents in Sheffield and Buxton.) We leave on Tuesday, after a visit to our financial adviser, hem hem.

Lesley-Jayne has promised us a visit on Monday morning, but must not be allowed to get us all pissed like she normally does. (Sometimes she even provides the booze!)

On the way home from the pub, we watch bats over the railway-line.

Oh Nooo!

Lemmings was the most addictive computer game ever. And now it's available in a version for PC. How will I ever finish anything? Especially when I get distracted by sites such as this?

We're off to the General Hospital (near the Golden Guinea, The Ostrich, and the docks, do drop in ha ha) today, for David's long-awaited X-ray.

Doctoring the script

I've just discovered the BBC's Writersroom page (and found out how to do clever links!). It's got Word templates you can download for filmscripts, TV dramas, sitcoms, radio shows, novels and short stories. I've started rewriting A Fighting Chance as a screenplay for TV. What fun!
It's raining (on and off) so instead of going to Portishead for the day, I'm playing with script formats while David watches Eastenders.
Tomorrow the doctor's.

My Affair with John Prescott

Getting on well with A Fighting Chance, and am now watching Big Brother for background. Oh. My. God. It's worse than I could have imagined. Who are these people?

As bloggers have been in the news lately, I feel I have a responsibility to make the following disclosure. I have not had, am not having, and have no intention of having an affair with John Prescott. He's just not pretty enough. Sorry, John. Love you.

This old mouse

Didn't manage to make the image wrap too well, did I? Maybe I'll go back and edit it soon.

I realised yesterday that I should be writing more short stories, as Chaos is taking some time. So I didn't have one idea. Today I thought of an idea I'd had a while back, about a Big Brother-type TV show ending in a fight to the death. Thought about it all day at work, and was able to write an almost complete synopsis when I got home. Except I don't know who wins. No. really, I don't.

And I don't know how to start...

This mouse is driving me potty.

I learn to upload photographs

This a photograph of my* cat, Simba. He is currently resident in Nuneaton, Warwickshire with my friends Fred and Sylvia, and their other cat, Sam-puss. Both cats are male, although Sam as a kitten was thought to be female and was called Sue, until we noticed she had something little-girl-cats don't. The cats play nicely together, and are known collectively as Sim and Sam.

When I started writing the first chapter of Chaos Man, I had a character list the names of guests at her forthcoming dinner-party. I included the names Sam and Simon because they were deliberately ambiguous; Sam could be short for Samantha, and/or Simon could be short for Simone. They turned out to be a gay couple when I wrote the dinner-party scene. (I also had Ali and Ian, but they didn't show.)

I wasn't thinking of cats when I chose the names; they just emerged from under my fingers as I typed.



________________________________
*to the extent that a cat is anybody's, that is.

A scream in the park

So I'll keep the name as it is until I hear from those nice people at Blogger.

On my way to work yesterday, I saw a lesser black-backed gull attacking a young fox in the park. The gull dived at the fox, screaming and pecking at its head. The fox just ducked down, and then sat up again when the bird had passed. They did this several times. The fox didn't run away as a cat would have done; it just stood there, looking at me. The gull flew up into a tree, and then made another screaming pass. I could have watched for as long as the confrontation lasted, but I had to go to work. I wish I'd had a video camera. (And I did: my phone has one, but it's not very good.)

Thought of a twist to the ending. It involves the main characters confronting an author at a book-signing to get him to pick up writing one of his unfinished characters so that she (the character) will stop unleashing chaos on the world. But the author, deviously, sends the story off in a new direction. Note how I'm becoming cagey about plot details. It's all a bit up-in-the-air at the moment.

Rang my mother to ask if she'd been to a book-signing. Do the customers buy a book and queue up for it to be signed, then go to the checkout; do they go to the checkout, then queue for the signature; or does the author have a pile of books by his side? They take a book from a pile, then queue up for the author, who also has a pile of books by his side (in case you want another one for your auntie).

Remembering the Idea Fairy, I write it all down...

Someone left a fully-functional ergonomic keyboard outside their house today. It said so on a piece of paper sellotaped to it, which also said "Take me Home!" So I did. Aren't people nice? I'm using it now. And I suppose I must do likewise with my old keyboard.