Our week began in a similar fashion to the previous one: shoot into the hospital on Monday morning for a blood test (for Pat), dash home, bite to eat, walk the dog and then back for the afternoon chemo session. Home by six o’clock, grub, feet up, watch TV. Phew! Poor Pat: this chemo session was more tiring for her, probably because she started her morning tummy jabs on Monday, which usually means her immune system is at its lowest. The jabs are finished now, and she is showing signs of improvement already, thank God. We now have one eye appointment for Pat this week, then a couple of weeks before we’re back on the treadmill.
Some sad news for me as well this week: my elder sister, Joyce, died after an operation which she knew could be fatal. She was 90, very frail, and not really expected to last much longer. She had a fall at home which led to the op and her subsequent death. In the midst of life etc…
I struggled to get through the crime thriller (?) I was reading. The author, who currently has a series on Amazon and apparently doing well, made what I believe is a basic mistake, and one that irritates me intensely. The two main characters, one a DCI and the other a DS were called Grecko and Grace. The more pages I turned, so my irritation increased I was literally speed reading just to get to the end. I mentioned this to one of my sons during the week. He told me that when he attended a script writing course in London about twenty years ago, they were told never to use the same initial letters for characters because of the confusion it would lead to. This was the same script writing school that Guy Ritchie had attended the year before my son. So, I’m not alone in considering that kind of thing as poor writing. But that’s my opinion and I could be wrong.
No news yet from Joffe Books about Past Imperfect, but I don’t really expect anything until probably the end of the month.
Having ‘finished’ that book I started looking for something else, going through the best sellers etc. on Amazon until I leapt back into my past and downloaded a Hammond Innes novel. Innes has always been my favourite writer and I've read most of his books, including this one, The Lonely Skier. I can’t remember anything about it of course because it was so long ago, but already I’m enjoying a master wordsmith. Incidentally, it was his novel, Campbell’s Kingdom that inspired me to write North Slope (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01L02R626): published by Macmillan in 1978 and saw me being described as a “gifted narrator” in the Financial Times. Thanks to Hammond Innes.
I managed to make more microscopic progress on my current WIP. I will get there eventually, but I have to fit my writing time in when I can. I’m currently writing this blog in the front room after walking the dog, quick shop over the road, and getting the ironing done. And on top of all this, just like everyone, I have to give serious thought to the corona virus and all it portends, particularly as I’m looking after a vulnerable woman, and also because I’m at that age (79 this month), which also puts me in that category. I would have been travelling up to London tomorrow for the Self-Publishing Live show at the South Bank on Monday. I cancelled my ticket last December, so have had plenty of time to get used to the idea of not going. The London Book Fair has been cancelled, and we wondered if the SBS Live would be too. But it’s going ahead, and they are expecting most of the 900 who purchased tickets to attend. A few have pulled out because of the virus implications, which is a shame for them.
That’s it then. Now, where are my pills? Wish me luck.