A weekend of firsts!
Friday, October 15th, 2010According to the countdown on my blog site I have just one day and one hour to go until my first-ever book signing! It’s clever of it to know that because I haven’t confirmed with Waterstones what time I’m starting yet. I’m sure they said 9am but I personally think that 10am would be a much more sensible time. Those customers who are in at 9am will want to ease into their day gently by browsing shelves and not talking much, it will take until the people who have stayed in bed so long that they didn’t make it in till 10am arrive before anyone begins to engage with me. I’m sure. And also I don’t like getting up early. No, I’m joking. I do quite like getting up early actually. I think it’s because it takes me a long time to wake up in the morning, I’m not one of those people who can bounce out of bed at 8am and start earnestly discussing Pythagoras’ theorem over a cup of tea. To be brutally honest I’m not sure that I could discuss Pythagoras’ theorem at any time of the day or night. Is it something to do with triangles? It fascinates and slightly horrifies me that anyone could be so interested in triangles that they come up with a theory about them. Can you imagine how bored you would have to be? I find maths in its entirety frighteningly boring. But at least it’s easy to date Pythagoras’ theorem – it simply must have been before the days of Sky + and Coronation Street. I wonder how many new theories are developed these days? Not many, I’ll bet. Everyone’s too busy watching Come Dine With Me and Michael Macintyre’s Comedy Roadshow.
Anyway, that’s why I like getting up early so I can have a good long time to properly wake up before I need to be coherent. But don’t worry, I shall be fully awake and coherent by the time I start signing books tomorrow. I am going to spend today flexing my book-signing muscles and deciding what pen to use. I normally use a fountain pen but I’m not too sure how good an idea this is; it certainly looks very nice but the ink can be unreliable sometimes and there’s nothing worse than signing a book for someone and having to go over the words again. I know because it happened at the launch but luckily it was someone I knew. I think if a person buys a book tomorrow and I sign it they have a right to expect a decent, legible signature. Not something that looks like someone’s old aunt has signed it. Mind you, if someone’s old aunt starts signing my books in Waterstones her signature will be the least of my worries.
And talking about getting up early it’s a good job that I don’t mind doing it because on Sunday I shall have to be up and about super-early to be on the radio! I don’t mind admitting that it’s something I’m mildly nervous about, simply because I’ve never done it before. Fear of the unknown and all that. But everybody that I’ve spoken to has said there’s nothing to it and it’s just like having a conversation with someone. Let’s hope so……..! For those who don’t know, I am going to be a guest on the Nick Girdler Show on BBC Radio Solent between 9:30-9:50am. With that and my book signing this is a real weekend of ‘firsts’ for me. It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever turned down an invitation for Saturday night in favour of going to bed early and getting a good night’s sleep.
And finally, some of you will be pleased to hear that progress on Manuscript Number 2 is well under way. I’d already written a few thousand words (20,000 to be precise) but they needed heavy editing which is nearly completed. I’ve taken bits out, simplified some of my characters and generally made it as good as it can be – and I’m very pleased. As an author you know when you’ve got it right because as you read your own words a sense of excitement sort of fizzes up inside you and you think – yes! I’ve done it! I have the basis of a very good book and I am excited about writing the rest of it. It’s going to be a fun thing to write. I need to do more planning which I find terribly dull and frustrating, I don’t want to be planning what will happen, I want to be writing it, creating it, bringing it all to life and seeing what happens next. Because a lot of the time the characters write themselves and I’m sometimes surprised with what they say and how they behave. I censor them occasionally, they can’t be allowed to run amok, but I have a good collection of characters this time which is nice to work with.
I shall leave it here for today as I have several thousand things to do and nowhere near enough time to do them all. I would like to say a massive THANK YOU for all the feedback I’ve been getting. It’s both rewarding and useful to know what people are thinking about me and my book. And I’m so pleased that so many people are reacting to Steph in the way that they are meant to, it means that my writing has worked.
The countdown on my blog site now reads just twenty two hours to go, so you can all see how long it has taken me to write this! What can I say……I’ve been so distracted by developing my new theorem for triangles that I couldn’t concentrate properly on writing this. If there is sufficient interest then I shall publish the results of my theorem next time; it can form the first sentence of my blog.
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