Moving on

I don't seem to get to this blog as often as I'd like too! But I'm here now. 

I've been very busy. I finished the rewrite of the novel I wrote in November and published it on Amazon for Kindle, not expecting it to sell, but really to get it out of the house. The more I corrected, the more I found to correct. It simply had to stop! But I changed the ending back to what I had envisaged from the time I realized I was going to have to finish it in 30 days (!), so now it's more or less the book I wanted it to be. I tried to find an alternative to the rather prosaic beginning, and may still change the order, but I have not found a mechanism for doing that without spoiling the lead up to the first "crime of the week". The whole book takes place in the space of 9 days. I didn't want a cops and robbers effect because I'm not a crime novelist and books I've downloaded and have been reading to see if I could turn into one have convinced me that I simply don't know enough about the milieu of such characters, let alone the vocabulary! My imagination does not stretch that far, either!

Here's the blurb for the book:

Don't ask me where the photo was taken! I have so many photos of everywhere I go! The main thing was not to choose one with Welsh mountains on it because there aren't many mountains down Oxford way and the book is set in a fictional village somewhere in that area. I might change the cover if I can find a better photo! 

The formatting is not ideal, but I think it has something to do with the PDF settings in Word. I will reload it as a wordfile if I can get that to function!

While surfing the net I had to type one of those strange letter combinations to publish a comment and could not resist saving this one: UGHTAH. It has all the makings of a fairytale character, so I started writing about a giant named Ughtah and will finish it when I have more time.

Use CTRL++ (plus sign) to enlarge the print and CTRL+- (minus sign) to shrink it.  Here's the beginning:

Ughtah and his Guardian Angel  (A little story about a big guy)

Ughtah is a big guy. He has a big feet and a big voice, but most importantly, a big heart.

When he enters a room he has to duck so that he doesn't bang his head on the top of the door frame.

When he sits down, he takes up two-thirds of his sofa. Everyone looks up to Ughtah but you can't see what's behind him.

His problem is that he looks up to everyone else, so he is often scared when someone gets angry and shouts at him and he can see what's going on behind someone.

This makes life difficult for Ughtah because he never knows who is not shouting at him and who is not hiding behind him.

One day Ughtah decided to go for walk, the sun was shining and the birds were singing.

Ughtah thought the sun was shining especially for him so he said a loud THANK YOU to the sun and smiled with as much warmth someone could do who was not the sun himself.

When the birds saw Ughtah, they each sang a special tune for him. The one who sang the best song was the cuckoo, but the other birds did not care much for that feathered friend. Instead they sang tunes like Ugh-ugh-ugh-ugh-tah, or Ugh-tah-ugh-tah-tah, or even tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-ugh.

If it was raining, the birds did not stick around to get wet, and neither did Ughtah. Instead, he listened to music in his room. His favourite tune was by a guy called Beethoven and went Ugh-tah-tah-tah, but sometimes he played music himself on his old upright piano. Tunes like Ugh-tah-tah- Ugh-tah-tah were his favourites.

He also liked to play when his friend Diddle was over for a visit. Then they would play Did-dle-ugh-tah-tah fourhanded, and Diddle, who was very little and had very little feet, but a big heart like Ughtah's but not quite as big, would wind the revolving piano stool as high as it would go and sing along to the piano-playing.

When they had finished playing they would open a bottle of lemonade and quench their thirst.

Then they would go into the kitchen and retrieve the donuts someone baked for him every day, and eat them all up to the last crumb, heaving nothing in the dish, but with a frame of icing sugar round their mouths.

One day, Ughtah said to Diddle 'We're getting fatter and fatter on these donuts. We must find out who makes them and ask them to make only half as many in future.'

It was true. Ughtah now not only had to bend over to avoid the door frame, but he had to squeeze himself through the door opening with a push that ended with a boing as he emerged the other side.

I'll leave you with Ughtah for today. The story is for children, as you will have gathered from reading it. I'm now looking for someone to illustrate it. I don't think I know enough about illustrating to do it myself.