I have been to the library.
I have taken Cliff Richard’s splendid autobiography back. Did you know that he was an avid fan of Coronation Street, and then once Minnie Cauldwell referred to him as That Chubby Cliff Richard, and he was so horrified that he went on a diet.
In its place I have had the good fortune to discover that they had Boris Johnson’s heavy book of excuses, called Unleashed, which obviously I seized off the shelf, and I am looking forward to discovering what he has got to say for himself.
Libraries are truly magnificent places, even the one in Windermere, which has got a lot of books with anguished looking ladies and loopy writing on the cover.
It is going to make this evening pass with a swing, especially if there aren’t any customers, and so I am writing this before I set off, especially so I won’t have anything that I Should Be Doing hanging over me, and can delve in uninterrupted.
I was not interrupted very often last night. I have been at work all week and have not yet made a hundred pounds. I do not mind this because it isn’t as if I was doing anything else, but if I were my own mother I would be gently suggesting that I found some more lucrative occupation, I will never be able to keep myself in an idle old age at this rate..
Speaking of which, the funeral organisers never wrote back to me about the results of my interview at all. I have written to them, twice now, wondering if they might confirm that Sorry On This Occasion You Have Been Unsuccessful, but without any kind of result whatsoever, and I am somewhat surprised by this. If I was going to go to all the trouble of interviewing people for gainful employment, I would at the very least choose one of them and tell all the rest that they were rubbish, but they haven’t, so perhaps it was some kind of elaborate scam, like the advertisements you see advertising drilling opportunities in Nigeria.
It is a good job I didn’t give them my bank details.
I am, however, still contemplating my options in regard to my recently-completed story.
I am thinking that I will very probably not bother sending it to an agent for whom I have to cut out thirty thousand determinedly considered words. As Mark pointed out, that is a quarter of the story, and without it the story is just a hasty rush with all sorts of thrilling adventures skipped over or completely ignored.
As it turns out we live in a marvellous cyber-universe where actually I don’t need to be legitimately published on expensive paper, because there is always the mighty Internet.
I can put it on there myself for absolutely nothing, and if it sells even a single copy then I will be better off. Also one of our tutors told us how much he is making from his own, magnificently published literary epics, and frankly he would be better off driving a taxi, even this week.
I have been contemplating this and frowning all day.
I could edit it, and just put it directly online in a couple of weeks when it is done.
I don’t know what I think about this. It seems like a great leap into the unknown, not least because I don’t know the first thing about anything online. I have been trying to find out today and instantly fallen down a rabbit hole of trying to work out what is the difference between a PHP and an HTTPS, but I am sure it can’t be that impossible to understand, and if it all gets too much I will just ask one of the children.
On the plus side, it means I do not have to waste weeks and weeks of jumping through all the hoops that agents want before they eventually write and say Sorry But On This Occasion You Have Been Unsuccessful. I would not even need to bother to try.
One of our lectures explained about how to put your book on Apple Books and Amazon when I was at Cambridge, although I can’t remember a thing about it now, I wish I had paid more attention. The only thing I do remember was the lecturer saying that it was the Way Forward, although they were a visiting lecturer and not one of our own tutors. I will have to have a look back through the notes and see if they say anything about PHPs.
I will have to consider it carefully.
