Monday 23 March 2009

Juggling and publishing

The wind is howling and the bin bag, usually tucked behind the downpipe by the binmen, has blown away and the house across is having cavity wall insulation, so this will not be a quiet day for working on Falmouth assignments.

Also I need to do some more typesetting for the forthcoming re-publication of the Leo Walmsley book, Phantom Lobster, which is due out in early May. I am working with image files that I first prepared almost three years ago and, because of changes in style and presentation that have been adopted in the more recently republished books, Phantom requires a lot of extra work to bring it up to scratch.

I have asked my wife to write the 'back cover blurb' - and that's another task: the cover. The artwork was painted last autumn but the white of the canvas is showing as yellow on the computer image file, so that's something to sort out.

Oh well, between the Walmsley work and UCF, I shall never be short of something to do.

Wednesday 18 March 2009

The first page

I've seen a few of these in my time. Perhaps that sounds as if I've seen too many first pages and never reached the end. Well, I think all writers have an imbalance of the first page/last page ratio, but I have to say that I've had a few last pages. My problem (one of them - you knew that was coming, didn't you? I mean, it's natural for people to put themselves down, particularly if they're English and born in the 1960s (or even before then!) so there'll be no further negatives in this post) is that... where was I - oh, yes: my problem is that... there, you see, it's gone. Typical writer!