Phantom wanderings

The MA course is still commanding more of my time than is healthy, but now that the end of the first study block is in sight - and there's the promise of specialising from June onwards - the heavy workload facing all 17 of us over the next 7 weeks will seem worth the torment, I'm sure.

In the meantime, the latest Leo Walmsley book has been ordered from the printer, having "signed off" the proofs, as they say. All the work involved in publishing has had to be slotted in with other tasks and the UCF work. It's no wonder the car is dirty!

Set in the late 1920s, the novel Phantom Lobster is the story of one man's dream to make lobster fishing safer and more profitable for the inshore fishermen. Above is the cover using another of my paintings.

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.

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!