The worst thing about writing a novel comes at the end. This is the point when you believe that your work is as good as it’s ever going to be and you’re thoroughly sick of re-reading the same stuff over and over again. One thing remains – the synopsis. One word can sum this up:

Bastard.

In my case, I’m sat on a 85,000 word book I finished last year. I’m as happy as I can be with it (i.e. I hate the fucker with a passion) and ready to whore it around agents. The final thing to do before sending it out is to boil down tens of thousands of words into a few sheets of A4 that capture the entire plot, its characters and tone all in a format that’s marginally more entertaining than the book itself. This is something I should be capable of bashing out in couple of hours with a decent enough run-up.

This run-up has taken two weeks so far.

The synopsis is the sales pitch. It’s the sticker on the car windscreen, the payoff at the end of the ad, the thing that, if it’s good enough, will get an agent to read some of your book before sitting down and printing off a stock rejection letter. In that sense, it’s more important that the book itself.

This post already contains enough words to full around 10% of the bugger.

Enough of that already.

I've started work on yet another side project. This time it's an illustrated story for kids. I like the theme and I thought it would be good to finally produce something without swear words that I can let Jnr. read.

It also means I can do something other that write a synopsis and not feel too guilty about it.

The new arrival’s doing well, although life’s busy at the moment. The mother-in-law picked up one of those trendy new superbug things all the cool old people are getting these days and has been in an out of hospital for the last eight months having various drugs poured into her to get rid of thing. This means plenty of visits to hospital to either smuggle her out or deposit her into one of East Surrey’s pre-war (that’s possibly the one in the Crimea) beds. I’d really like to just sit down and do sod all for a few days. This is currently pencilled in for some time in 2037.

The problem with blogs, at least this one, is keeping up to date. There’s a law of diminishing returns that states the more interesting a person’s life becomes, the less time they have to write about it. At least that’s my excuse and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees.

Since that god-awful last post, I’ve gained a new daughter (called Alex - pics in the gallery if that's your kind of thing), ploughed on with the latest novel and dusted down a previous, complete effort. The plan’s to finally get a synopsis written and pimp the ugly bastard to any agent that might be interested. I’m also looking for a few readers to take a gander at the first three chapters to make sure they’re clean and make sense. Drop me a line at the usual address and I’ll get back to you eventually.

I’m now back at work. Which means I’ll rapidly burn through any karma points earned over the last few weeks and will have to remember all the various shimmies, shikes and shoulder drops necessary to avoid whatever piece of free-sheet arsewipe newsprint NI or AP are trying to ram into my hands during my evening commute.

But that’s for this evening. Meantime, I’ll be sucking down a dozen cups of hot crap from the ‘coffee’ machine and working up a really good head of steam as I plough diligently through my inbox.

Either that or pump my delete key until it glows like an Iranian nuclear pile.