This blog is an update to the much more upbeat and optimistic blog “New Beginnings.”
In that blog (read it here), we had just arrived back in the UK and were waiting for our house to be ready at the end of November. The house is not a fancy custom build, just a very modest center terrace in the heart of Somerton. Well, with all of the supply chain BS it is obviously running late and is now scheduled for mid-Jan. That puts us in AirBnB’s through Christmas.
That is OK (I guess), at least there is nothing we can do about it. But the AirBnB’s have not been great. The search begins with much excitement, but then you enter into the filter, the dreaded words “pets accepted” and the number of results falls precipitously, apparently in direct correlation to the standards of cleanliness and decor that can be subsequently expected.
We stayed in a “cozy cottage” in Yorkshire which, while beautifully situated on the moors, had furniture so ancient, hard, angular and uncomfortable that a queue would have been formed by disgraced monks seeking a penance significantly harsher than self-flagellation, and bedding so damp I honestly awoke one morning certain that I had embarrassingly wet my self. At least I was in a single bed, so if I had disgraced myself, my wife would have been spared the opportunity to share that particular life moment.
Onto another “cozy cottage,” this one in Oxfordshire, which wont be named here because I don’t have a good lawyer. It was really just two small rooms carved, hastily and untidily, out of the back of a working barn. It had rooms filled with spiders and timbers full of worms, windows that leaked, and a hob with a mind of its own, all crammed into the smallest space that man had ever had the temerity to deem a kitchen. The rolling fields of the country estate were filled with warnings of “alarm mines” and signs depicting scowling skulls crossed with bones, that kept the dogs on leads and us on the paths. It was simply awful.
The traveling and conditions have had a detrimental effect on both the blog and the WIP. I am genuinely close to finishing the first draft of the WIP, but its the last 5 or 6 chapters, and while I know how it ends, I am endlessly procrastinating on specifically how to get there. It will run to around 44 chapters and 62,000 words and I really need to just have a word with myself and get it done.
There! Just writing that down has helped – thanks for your toleration of the whining.
On a more upbeat note, I have been running some Amazon ads and have had some positive traction on my previous book “The Haunting of Edgar Allan Poe.” Some of the reviews (every Indie writer can always do with more!), have made me blush, but more importantly, have made me believe in myself and want to continue to write.
Gothic Masterpiece, you say? Deliciously intense? Surely not!
Ahhh, shucks…color my cheeks crimson.
I really hope you take some small pleasure in the blog. I started this in May and have rapidly moved from thinking it was something I had to do, a marketing task, if you will, to thoroughly enjoying writing it. I think it has become 50% self-aggrandizement and 50% self-therapy and in doing so have built a solid foundation of followers, so thank you.
Please take a small moment to check out the rest of the website.
Follow the blog?
Maybe buy a book?
Oh yeah, and I just joined Goodreads, which is a really amazing site for readers and writers alike, and, right now, I have zero followers which is simply embarrassing, and only you can help me fix that. Click on the image below, follow me and together we can stop this (extremely minor) tragedy.
Writer & Novelist 