Friday 29 June 2018

Editing and writing - the difference!


Friday 29th June
Sunshine continues to blast out of a clear blue sky, though when I woke yesterday the world was swathed in mist and I was chortling at the thought of a cool day. By 9.10am the mist had vanished and there was the sun again. My swimming is improving to the point of 14 crossings of the pool while dh lounges on the side counting them off on the fingers of both hands. Nothing to write home about for the excellent swimmers out there, but for me, it’s good!

I’m done with the wip but for the last chapter, and I want to sort out some twists in the storyline before I attempt that. Things grow as you write, don’t they, and a few tweaks are needed to get everything in line. All this exceedingly hot weather means I can concentrate on writing, or rather editing. I need to check for single v double quotes, since I first began this story using single ones and then decided I didn’t like them. Much as it grieves me to agree with any reader of the USA who insists on them, I do find them easier on the eye. (Must be my sight deteriorating as I get older, as I never used to mind which type were used.)

Then there are all the repeated or missed words, typos and most of all correcting any errors in names or facts. One instance of Justin has cropped up already in the first two chapters instead of Jehan, which is the name I finally decided to give my Frenchman. Most of all it is smoothing out the writing, making sure pronouns don’t confuse the action and strengthening the verbs. If I can think of a prettier or more interesting way to say something, I’ll use it. There’s so much to look out for that I do only half a dozen pages in one burst and then do something else for a while. Tim benefits, as that often means walking the dog around the fields and lanes!

Tuesday 26 June 2018

Lunch in Lalinde


Tuesday 26th June

Yesterday we went to Lalinde and got hissed at (or Tim did) as we walked past the basin to go on our walk, for a pair of swans had a nest there. We walked by the canal, mostly in the shade of beautiful trees, which was wonderful, since the average temperature was 28 degrees – and seemed hotter in full sun!

All in all it was about 3 kilometres to the bridge and back, and by the time we got back into the town, we were all flagging. It was a little early for lunch so we went and sat by La Dordogne where it was cooler. There was a lot more water flowing fast, more than we remember seeing; the river bed was completely filled with fast flowing water and we could see the river bed and the long streamers of weed. The swans that usually cluster on the opposite bank were nowhere to be seen. We ambled back to the square and chose our seat. The waiter asked if we wanted drinks or food and when I said, “Food,” he said we would have to wait ten or fifteen minutes. “That’s fine,” I said.


We sat in the shade of the large timber and stone building and it was delightful as long as you didn't look up. Strong wire netting prevents the pigeons from roosting in the eaves and thereby dropping little parcels on your table, or worse, on your plate; but the dust of ages has attached itself to the netting and the lamps that are up there for the evening sessions are covered in fluffy dirt. A housewives nightmare and I don't know what the H&SE would say!

Once the magic hour of 12 clicked by, the waiter was all action with his staccato French delivered in gun bursts; three menus for our delectation, a bowl of water for Tim, and a grande Pression for Bill. I chose Salad aux gesiers, which is duck’s liver and walnuts on a bed of lettuce with a tasty dressing. Bill chose confit du canard I think, and devoured the lot plus some of the liver from my plate. Tim got a fair chunk, too, but there was enough for all.

We debated having dessert, but there is a boulangerie/patisserie across the corner and I opted to select two cakes to take home. “Une mille feuille and a tartlette aux fraises, ce tout,” I said in my school-girl French – and was understood! 4.45 Euros I paid.
We drove back with the air con full on and had coffee and the cakes in the cool of the house. Then we fell asleep. A siesta helps get through the heat of the day in a most delightful way.

Saturday 23 June 2018

Hot Summer Days


Saturday 23rd June

The heat continues, which is great for drying washing in no time flat, but a bit hard on the old skin. Once upon a time I would be lying out there, soaking it up, lashing on the suntan oil and cursing the insect life, but those days are gone. It is also, dare I say, tiring. Even Tim the dog wallows around in the heat. He comes alive early in the morning and late in the evening. He’d happily go for a walk at 11 o’clock, but by then the lanes are darkness itself where the trees overhang. Moonlight makes the hay fields light grey but there is little depth perception in such poor light. Even with a torch I wouldn’t be going out there by myself, especially not after seeing the seventh episode of The Bridge. Scary!

The farmer is out cutting the hay. So far the field on the hillside across the lane has been done, and the funny little field tucked inside a ring of trees, and yesterday the field next to the asparagus plot (seven rows this year) was cut. The hay is drying where it fell, and in a day or so he’ll be back to turn it and then back again to bale it. He hasn’t even begun the bigger fields to the west of us, but they may belong to another farmer who is working to a different timetable. Some days we have the roar of tractors all around us with two or three zipping about. Country living is not always quiet! Nor are the fields easily recognised as belonging to a specific farm. There seems to be little logic to the way it works here; one farmer owns fields that are scattered around the locality instead of being one neat parcel as they so often are in England. It probably comes from marriages and inheritance amalgamating different bits over the years.

My writing continues. Most days I do at least an hour or so of actual writing on the laptop. Some days the writing comes easier than others. One day it was 580 words completed, the following day 901, and yesterday I completed chapter 32, the tricky bit where Matho escapes from a locked room. Soon I shall be at the end, and then will have to begin revisions on the paper version I brought with me.

Thursday 21 June 2018

First Swim


The last couple of days have been stiflingly hot. 28 degrees on Tuesday and 32 degrees on Wednesday, both with a clear blue sky. I had my first swim yesterday and it is hard to explain the pleasure of a pool on a hot day. Especially a pool that has only one person in it – me! Not sharing my pool with anyone may seem selfish, but dh doesn’t swim, doesn’t like the idea of swimming and can’t be persuaded in. So I enjoy my solitary swim without guilt.

Today it is still hot, but not quite as hot and there are clouds in the sky. Fluffy white ones, but no doubt the thunderstorm will be along shortly.

I couldn’t sleep last night. Still awake at midnight with dh sound asleep beside me, I climbed out of the igloo (as I think of our mosquito tent) and heard Tim get up from his basket to meet me. I tiptoed out in the darkness to the balcony room, opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony, dodging the chairs left anyhow while the rail is painted. It was delightfully cool out there, and there was moonlight from a quarter moon, and so many stars above me! The frogs were having a party down by the lake, judging by the noise, but there was nothing else moving. Nothing that I could see, I ought to add. I collected my ipad, some water from the fridge and went back to bed where I read a good few chapters of the novel I’m reviewing for Discovering Diamonds before finally dropping off to sleep.

Slept late courtesy of dh letting me lie in after he got up, and rose at 8am. Set out to walk Tim at around ten minutes to ten. He’d already been around the lake and back again before breakfast, but this time we set out on a lead walk towards the two bridges and the crossroads. The trees along the bridge stretch gave shade and it was a delightful tunnel of cool and quite a shock as we emerged into the full glare of sunshine at the other end. We set off up the hill towards Fouleix and the Lambert farm, but soon turned back. My goodness, it was hot and continuing uphill with it getting hotter and hotter was not appealing, no matter how pretty the view with its vast sweeping curve around the field planted with sweet corn still only a foot high.

We turned round and got back at 10.45. If I want to walk Tim on the roads, I need to be up and out by nine at the latest. At least we only saw one white van, and that was after we got back home! (Tim hates white vans. Here in France the roads are so very narrow that when a van goes by at high speed, as they so often do, it is very close to us and he hates them with a vengeance. From the barking that erupts I don’t doubt he would tear the white van wheel from wheel if he could get at it.)

Sunday 17 June 2018

Spiders, wasps and the rest!

Sunday  17th June
Several grey days with little breaks of sunshine now and then have passed slowly by. We have had rain, but not too much, so the tractor came out yesterday and cut the drive, the “garden” and a trackway around the lake that does a big loop because DH refuses to take a new tractor across the boggy patch where the spring runs down. He remembers two eight wheel diggers vanishing into the mud never to be seen again when the M1 was built between Durham and Darlington. So the slope up to the house remains uncut and looks gloriously wild.

I put on an apron yesterday (to avoid splashing my clean top) to cook dinner and discovered several little cylindrical shaped things attached to the right breast – just like a brooch. Made out of mud, obviously the work of some insect or spider, I called DH and they were hastily despatched to oblivion. Sitting on the bolly later I looked up and saw two wasps upside down on the oak beam doing something that could have been mating. 

DH has better eyesight than me (I need new glasses) and said they had started building a nest and he wasn’t having that over his head while he was eating, so once they flew away, he got hold of a broom and knocked it down. Inside were little golden ball things, which I took to be some kind of tree flower or berry. Huh! Later I spied one of the golden balls under the chair and curiosity got the better of me; I scooped it up on a piece of kitchen paper and put it on the table and really looked at it. Quelle horreur! It was a tiny golden spider with six almost translucent legs and a red spot on its body. I have no idea what kind of a wasp turns into a spider, or vice versa, but it was soon got rid of into the long grass. (It was already dead; I didn’t kill it.) The wasps came back, couldn’t find their nest and haven’t returned.

Doing some washing yesterday, I stuck my hand into a plastic bag of Persil non-bio capsules and found a sticky soggy mass. Ugh! Withdrew hand rather swiftly and saw fingers covered in blue goo. One or more of the capsules had burst, and instead of being tight and hard, the rest of them were limp, squidgy things that degenerated into blue goo as I watched. I don’t know if one had accidently been burst, or the heat had been too much, or they had simply been there too long, but something had caused them to degenerate. Maybe they froze in the winter? I know it can get pretty cold, as low as minus 12 degrees C. I suppose if they froze they would expand and burst the bags? Anyway, washing powder is now on the list for our next shop.


Thursday 14 June 2018

France!


Here we are in France again. Although we had no hold ups or hiccups of any kind I found the journey tedious this year. Newcastle to Folkstone, with a break at Hatfield Forest (NT) near Stansted airport, is around 300 miles. We had booked into the Ibis at Abbeville where we had dinner and Tim behaved like an angel. Next morning we gave him a good 7.30am walk in the parc, then set off for another 450 miles with several short stops for him and us to stretch out legs.

Getting near our destination, We stopped at the local Intermarché and bought a few essentials so that DH would not have to get the car out on the road again the very next day. Once we left the main road for the almost single track leafy lane that led down into our valley, the sun came out and the world changed. I forgot the journey and started enjoying the greenery around me. It was 5.30 in the evening so we did little more than unload the car, eat pizza and drink a couple of glasses of wine while we enjoyed the view over green fields sitting on the balcony in the sunshine.

The fun came later. We had purchased a netting mosquito tent to save us from being bitten as we sleep, and we struggled to put it up. It sort of “pops up,” supported by four bendy canes placed one at each corner. They are an integral part of the structure, so no sliding in canes or anything that might bring back memories of putting up a tent when camping in the great outdoors. For a few seconds we had our structure up, and then one “leg” bent and sagged. It took us a good half hour of snapping the poles rigid and trying to hold them all in situ before we finally got it right. We unzipped and climbed inside and then realised we couldn’t put out the light! Worse still, we thought of trying to leave the tent for any reason in the dark and even worse than that, trying to get back in.

We managed, though we had the lights on again at one in the morning. Since we’d retired at something like half nine, that wasn’t at all bad, and we weren’t bitten. We woke at first light, around half five, and decided to get up. All in all we’d slept well, even if the tent was sagging in one corner.
Since the day is grey with only fleeting bursts of sun and much more frequent threats of rain, we have confined ourselves to snipping the greenery around the house, saving a lizard trapped in a pot it couldn't get out of and a frog that  appeared on the bolly - we had to stop Tim attacking it. Everything is hugely overgrown due to all the recent rain, the stream is full and the corner near the water is waterlogged. We can hear the weir from the drive, but it would take a machete to reach it and see what it looks like. Tim is having a grand time rushing through the grass, running in circles for the sheer joy of it, and we’ve spotted some big fish in the lake. So the coypu hasn’t got them all.

Saturday 9 June 2018

The Big Trip

Took our walk early this morning and though I avoided coming back home to get changed because of
the heat, I didn't manage to avoid the pollen. Itchy nose, and sneezing or wanting to sneeze. Not good.  We hosed Tim down with running water to get the pollen off him, because he is running through tunnels of grass higher than he is. In some area, the flowers are chest high on me - those white ones - cow parsley? and shake the grasses and dust clouds of pollen fly up. Still it is pretty and lush in the old sense of the word - abundant, succulent, voluptuous and we had it all to ourselves.

The blackbird chicks have fledged. The cuckoo abandoned its nest in the blue cedar, but the blackbird continued to fly in and out of the ivy trellis by our patio window, almost zonking us in the face as it whizzed by. Now the nest seems to be empty, but there is loud cheeping coming from the undergrowth and Tim finds something in there most interesting. We're keepng him away as best we can, though the poor dog has to go out and pee!

We are slowly gearing up for going off to France and our wellies are the first things going into the car. The rain clouds over the Dordogne have been almost constant for the last three weeks, so the stream is going to be full and the fields soggy. The stream under the mill might be running higher than usual. Still the temperature has been in the low twenties, and that is forecast to continue, so we won't be cold when we're outside. 

Wednesday 6 June 2018

Amazon Author Academy

Amazon held an event in Newcastle yesterday in the newly built Crown Plaze Hotel in what is fondly named the Stephenson Quarter. (Because of the railway Stephenson, I presume, since the hotel is very close to the railway tracks. Behind it, in fact.)

Scheduled as 9am-3pm, I arrived at 8.50 and spent 40 minutes kicking my heels until the event began at 9.45. I saw no one I knew in the milling crowds, almost too many for the space allocated and I kept moving around the halls and corridors as I knew I would be sitting for a long time.

Darren (I never knew his surname) kicked off and introduced panelists - Louise Ross, David Leadbeater, Paul Teague and Margaret Skea.
Paul represented The Alliance of Independent Authors and Margaret the Society of Authors. David and Lousie represented highly successful authors to tell us "how they did it."

Entertaining, informative and interesting. A lot of people were already published but many were not. I met some people I know at the coffee and lunch breaks, observed far more men in the audience than I expected and happened to be sitting next to someone for 5 hours who never volunteered a word, never shifted from her seat and made copious notes in miniscule writing on a clip board. Some authors are just loners. I first saw her sitting  on the floor in a corner, writing on her clipboard and that was at 9am while everyone else milled about talking and scoffing breakfast.

It seems that to be mega successful a writer also needs to ne a technical wizard these days, or be prepared to pay lots of money for outsourcing. £800 pounds sounds a lot of money to me for editing, and I hate to think what might be paid out for designing and establishing websites. There seems to be an industry following indie writers now. Cover artists, web designers,  societies that charge a joining fee; ISBNs, formatting charges to convert an ms into a Kindle book; some people claim several different kinds of editing are required, all at a cost.There are pitfalls, too. Some editors charge £200 and are not good at what they do. I suspect that cost is as much a gatekeeper these days as agents ever were. Not everyone can afford such costs when there are no guarantees a book will ever sell.

Friday 1 June 2018

Promote your title

Amazon are putting on a day in Newcastle and have offered me a free ticket. Naturally, I shall attend, but I cannot help wondering what it is all going to be about. 

I've been with them since my first venture in self-publishing way back in 2011 when I put Fair Border Bride with them. I had four books published by then, but for different reasons each of the two American publishers closed their doors and disappeared. Having got my rights back for the four titles, it seemed silly not to try and get them onto Amazon Kindle. How hard could it be? I seem to remember a steep learning curve, but I achieved my goal and since then the process has certainly become easier.

I've got out of the habit of approaching agents and publishers, but lately I've begun to wonder if it wouldn't be easier to let someone else take the strain of publication and marketing. My good friend Shirley Dickson has got a contract with Bookouture this week, and all congratulations to her, for I know she has worked hard on her two stories for such a long time. Obviously, her success stirred my thoughts on the subject. One hears that promo is down to the author these days unless you are one of the very top level authors - who probably don't need much promotion! 

The only way I know is using Twitter and Facebook, but those  seem to be in a process of change. Perhaps the Amazon day will tell me what I should be doing.

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