Kangaroo joey |
Go
Catch is a way of calling a taxi that’s new to me. The average mobile has GPS so if
you ring Go Catch, taxi drivers know where you are and if they can pick you up.
When we tried it, within a minute, four drivers had acknowledged us. We turned
one down because he was too far away. Within ten minutes, 28 had responded. We
agreed that one should pick us up, and he did, within five minutes, and told us
it was the first time he’d used the system!
There
are downsides, however. The next night, we agreed a pickup with one driver and
waited ten minutes. He failed to arrive. When we rang him back, he made
excuses, and it was obvious he’d ditched us in favour of other business. So it
was back to the drawing board, and the next contact went through successfully.
Since
it’s raining again, we’re trapped indoors and really quite glad for the rest.
It’s time to get to grips with the work I’ve managed to do in-between all our
sightseeing, and try and get it all in order. I’ve written about four or five
chapters of Matho and had them critiqued, so when I get back I’ll incorporate
them into the main file. After watching the programme on Ian Rankin, who writes the maverick detective Rebus, I was reassured to find that he takes eleven months to write and finish a new
book, and always, always feels around page 65 that it isn’t going to work, that it isn't good enough.
By
the time he’d written the last third of his latest book, he knew it wasn’t
good, and would need copious re-writing, but at least he had the outline. ‘Now
it just needs a lot of hard work to get it into shape,’ he said. Three or four
drafts later, he had the finished item, and he confessed that if he didn’t have
to meet a deadline with his publisher, he’d just go on tinkering with it, always thinking he could
make it better.
He also said that he'd published eight Rebus novels before the ninth took off in the public mind, so there's hope yet for all us still climbing the publication lists.
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