Reasons why I haven't been in touch...

759.

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t produced anything on Substack this week. Actually, I have written various Pieces, but not published them because...

I’m not sure why. True I’m slowly clearing my room of the accumulated rubbish from the three years since I last did this. I’m slow because I have to look at every piece of paper, every magazine, every book in case I want to read it again.

This makes me feel very overwhelmed as I realise the enormous quantities of stuff in the living room, the kitchen and (o god) the spare room. There are enormous quantities of stuff in Bill’s room too but they don’t bother me because they are his problems and not mine. He’s buying a new much larger book case and I have mad plans to move the Welsh dresser from the sitting room into the kitchen where it will just about fit and... Possibly get a new bookcase built in the sitting room.

My brain feels like it’s melting down and turning to treacle. All my life I’ve loved books. My parent’s house was similarly full of books to bursting. Yet, I have to get rid of some book or I’ll need to put up a tent in the garden to live in.

I’ve managed to create a rule for the New Scientists: if they’re older than January 2024, they have to go...

To the launderette library ten minutes down the road. No, I can’t even throw them out even though I am a subscriber and can get any article online.

The other reason I’m so distracted is that I’m working on the Word file of my latest book (NO MAN SO WISE). This is quite a finicky operation so that the software I use to make it ready for publication can cope with the Word file. It’s Atticus, by the way, which seems simpler than most but still has many hidden pitfalls and tanktraps.

So my excuse is that I have two large things to deal with in real life plus a massive thing in my head which may be an epic Romantasy novel and which seems to be tying up rather a lot of my neurons.