June was a blur. A sort of busy getting things done blur, interspersed with rain. I’ve been trying to keep on top of two things in what is technically the summer, even if the weather here in the High Peak has been anything but summer-like. I have been concentrating on finishing the next edit of All Steamed Up. Having written the draft and completed the structural edit to make sure the thing hung together properly (it didn’t, bits were missing or out of order), then gone through it to edit the writing (oh, so much to fix), set it aside and edited the writing again (hmmm, how did I miss that?), I’m on the edit to sort out punctuation and grammar. This has been amusing as some of the dialogue is written in Northern English dialect and the spellchecker is unhappy about it. Still, it’s done now and I’ve set it aside again as I’m not done with the editing process just yet. There will come a time when I say “enough, time to move on” but I’m not there yet.
On the rare days when the weather has been nice, I’ve stepped away from editing and ventured outside to try to keep on top of the kitchen garden and confront an army of slugs of not quite Biblical proportions. An order for 16 million nematode worms to go over the top and take them on seems to be working, for the time being at least (but try telling that to the cucumber plants who are looking very sorry for themselves). The wildflower meadow (formerly the front lawn) is beginning to look more like a meadow and less like someone couldn’t be bothered to cut the grass and the dandelions have gone rampant. As well as the two spotted orchids that self-seeded last year, the list of wildflowers growing is expanding. The red clover is beginning to establish itself but the introduction of yellow rattle has been a dismal failure as nothing has come up. I’ll have another go once I can get hold of fresh seed from this year.
While I wait on the feedback to be returned for Pass The Duchy and All Steamed Up, I’ve given The Scriptorium Chronicle (which has also been set aside) a quick skim through. I think I’ve fixed the slow start to January that the beta readers pointed out, but until I get others’ eyes on it won’t know for sure. There are a lot more illustrations than previously to make the pages balance visually, the calendaring is better (and turned into a running joke) and how each entry begins has been put right so that the reader doesn’t die of boredom from “In the Scriptorium today” every time. It also has the “gorgeous” endpapers requested in the beta reading. All in all, version 2.0 (or draft 6 as I call it) is a vast improvement on v1.0 (or the “I have no idea what I’m doing” version).
That leaves the thorny issue of what to work on next. I have no option but to wait for the feedback and don’t want to get ahead of myself with Pass The Duchy or All Steamed Up. I need to check if it is okay to send The Scriptorium Chronicle out for further beta reading, but that will involve waiting too. The Scriptorium Cookbook is a side project mainly for myself to gather together favourite recipes and is very much an “I’ll add to it as and when I have a moment” thing. That leaves… I don’t know. I have half a mind to take a look at the first novel I wrote a very long time ago and put in a drawer and forgot about. If I do, I am fully expecting to cringe at what I find, but that said, I do seem to remember there being some good ideas in there which if nothing else I can recycle. It had a cracking title too — The Flipside of Somewhen. Well, I like the title. There are also two novels that I abandoned uncompleted, one because the timing didn’t feel right (a sequel to Things Made Up) and one because I realised that I couldn’t write it the way it needed to be written (The Book of the Same Name). I might give that one another looking at to see if it still holds true. I don’t know. In the meantime, there is this website to add to and I need to explore other publication channels to get digital versions of my books onto a wider platform than the ‘Zon. That should keep me busy for a while.
I think I’ve rambled on enough for now…
Mark Weaver 