BAD NEWS AND GOOD NEWS

Hi folks! This is me and Candy on a local walk up in the Pyrenees a couple of weeks ago. I need these days occasionally - they happen all too rarely, I'm afraid - to blow away the cobwebs and empty the head of all the clutter that accumulates there. We're so lucky having this kind of terrain virtually on our doorstep.

The bad news is: My Christmas Play got the thumbs down from BBC Radio 4, but they did send a constructive crit. Unfortunately, they seemed to think that I should have made more of the homeless/drink/drugs background scenes. I touched too lightly on this aspect apparently, which is not surprising, really, since the story was actually about an old man and a bag lady and the granddaughter he didn't know he had, with a touch of fantasy thrown in - grown-up fairytale, you might say. Ah, well. Life's full of these small disappointments.

The good news is that I've put aside the contemporary novel I was writing, after tearing my hair out over the fact that I really wasn't enjoying writing the darned thing, and because of this, the writing wasn't flowing well. In fact, it was pretty pathetic. So, my still-born novel has been put to rest. Maybe I'll resurrect it some day, when I run out of fresh ideas in about 25 years time! So, I'm now working on another saga, having finished it once, then decided that I had condensed it too much to meet the publisher's demands. Well, it's a good story and cutting it down spoiled it for me, so I'm writing it now the way it was intended to be written. As far as I'm concerned, if I don't enjoy what I'm writing there's not much point in going on with it. I've set myself a deadline and hope it's finished and off to my agent before Christmas - that and the novella I'm also working on at present. So I'd better get the old finger out and get stuck in.