Boring Facebook

Disheartening to see how boring Facebook is these days. Old posts are being recycled so most of what comes up I've seen before and have no wish to see again. The link between Twitter and Facebook seems to have gone awry - or possibly it is me that gone awry!

 Most of twitter is adverts for books unless the hashtag topics are investigated and then interesting conversations can be found among the garbage. I wonder what is going to happen in the next few weeks. Will Fb/Twitter recover their
verve, or simpy dwindle into nothingness?

Just read the first Peter May Enzo files book, got right to the end and remembered I'd read it before. I think the only one I have not read is the third one, but if I read them in order, the whole plot might become clearer in my mind. So it is on to nmber 2.

Life

Editing can get tedious. I know I'm reaching that point because I find all sorts of excuses  not to knuckle down to it - even though I know I'm almost finished Banners. There's no chance of me touching it before I take Tim for a walk, and then I must have a coffee. Then I find I've drifted off onto checking my blog stats, my Kindle stats, and then collecting info before I have a look at the Nielsen website. Doing this, I've discovered that I have the same ISBN for Abduction of the Scots Queen on the Kindle version and the print copy. Not too sure what to do about it. I suppose the easiest thing would be to assign another to the Kindle copy, or to remove it completely. 

I actually received a tweet from Peter May yesterday. I had read The Critic and couldn't see why the last few lines of the book told me no one knew who killed Braucol the puppy and almost killed Enzo MacLeod. "He's still out there." Had my copy a chapter missing? So I tweeted him, and he tells me the answer comes in Book 6.  Nice of him to respond, but I'm not sure I like the ploy - I'd rather have the answers without reading another two books!

The weather this morning was glorious for  our walk.Some of the trees are green now and the grass has been growing for a week or so. Now it is splattered with dandelions and everything looks wonderful. Since I got home the sky has clouded over and the sunshine has disappeared, though we're not quite at the dismal state we were a few days ago - see pic!

Writing Style

69 Pages of edit done. Don't know how many more to do, but I'm less than half way through. Interesting to see how many small duplications there are, usually between the end of a chapter  the beginning of the next. Writing the story I tend to write in chapters, and so I have a sort of mental break between ending one and starting the next. That's where the duplication creeps in as I don't recall precisely how I ended the chapter and begin the new without checking. There's a lesson there somewhere!

I'm reading Extraordinary People by Peter May at the moment. It's an Enzo MacLeod story set in France and the story visits Paris, Cahors, and the Correze - all places I've visited, which always adds an extra frisson to a read. But I am astonished at the amount of location description I'm reading. My critique partners would be telling me to cut some of it. They often highlight my use of -ing endings, too, and yet Mr May uses them such a lot. One sentence stopped me dead because he had used two, one following the other. I am enjoying the story and don't mind his writing style. It is just interesting how often a successful writer's style contravenes what the writing gurus on the internet say we should do to achieve success. I think it is a little like a healthy diet - in spite of all the experts telling us to eat this and avoid that, eating everything in moderation is probably the best route. Likewise with gerunds and adjectives.

Spring is beautiful this year. We still have primroses in shady places among the trees, daffodils are dancing in the wind, and the cherry blossom is coming into bloom. Gorse is vibrant with yellow flowers and the leaves are bursting open on the trees and presenting a soft bloom of various shades of green. Garlic is rampant and green among the bluebells, neither of which have produced flowers yet, but it won't be long now.