Between Books

I know you are wondering - both of you - why I have rebooted this blog after an absence of more than a year, and why I have rejoined Facebook and Twitter. The reason, I think, is that my wheels are spinning without any traction, a state I get into when I am between books.

So let me bring you up to speed.

My book The Accidental Species was such a rip-roaring success - well, it actually made a profit in its first year, in hardback, something that has never happened to me before - that I was enjoined to write a terse technical tome called Across The Bridge, a project I had been at pains to avoid for years, but eventually I ran out of excuses.

'I'm not going to write another effing book!' I opined, one afternoon, after Across The Bridge had been published, notwithstanding inasmuch as which the request by my friend Mr B. C. of Swindon to write another novel featuring my detective heroine Persephone Sheepwool. It's all very well for Mr B. C., I thought, who churns out books faster than one can say 'Harriet Vane'.

My Carer and Private Brain Care Specialist Mrs P. G of Cromer, who knows me better than I know myself, remarked that I say that every time I finish a book, and that's when my former colleague Mr D. A. of London suggested I write a kind of memoir celebrating all the amazing discoveries with which I have been associated over thirty-plus years as senior bone-grinder at the Submerged Log Company.

To think - I had a key part in steering the amazing hobbit person of Flores into the light of day.

And when my friend Dr S. B. of Edinburgh describes in his celebrated book the cocktail party where the first feathered dinosaurs were revealed, it was at second hand, because he was only seven at the time. But I was there, in the Room Where It Happened.

So I wrote it. The working title is Let's Talk About Rex: A Personal History of Life on Earth. I even have a cover to go with the working title. Here it is:

Don't look for it yet. It's not out yet, and may never be, though my agent liked it enough to read it and suggest emendations, which I have made, and it's now in Version 2.0.

So I am in that state authors call Waiting For Things To Happen. In the meantime I have what looks like a freelance commission that'll keep me from prowling the streets at night.

So why has it taken me more than a year to return to teh interwebs? Well, it was like this. In May 2018, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was hitting the news, I was at my desk one Sunday and looked out of the window to see the sun shining. Thinking I should get out more, I went into the garden and did a few odd jobs. The birds were singing. The hens were clucking. This is the life, I thought.

So I went indoors, wound up my blog, and deleted my social media accounts.

Suitably rested, I am back in the fray.