I SIGNED MY CONTRACT TODAY!

I SIGNED MY CONTRACT TODAY!

I haven’t had much news to give recently but this wee snippet makes me smile and glow a little. Today I signed a contract for Blackbird Singing today with Fledgling Press. It’s in the post back to them and that is me committed to finishing the work. What a wonderful feeling!

I hope to continue writing for many years and to never lose the excitement and wonder when I realise I am going to have a book published. It will mean some changes though. My last draft had got so very far beyond my very first very awful draft but speaking with Clare last Friday, helped me realise and almost feel the new shape to the book; still about grief and loss and family and love but back come my own Dad, and my love for Wendy and those pieces where I sometimes manage to lose myself in my joy at the world, of course, I bring back schizophrenia and sectioning and all those things I thought I needed to let lie for a bit, why did I think that was a good idea?

It is very exciting. I can see how I will layer the bits and pieces around it and even, when I look at my hastily constructed table, can see that it is already about two thirds complete which is fine; with the many months lead in we have given ourselves until we to need to say it is done.

I think I will have to make my blog posts on my website just weekly now, purdah means I am not allowed to post some of the pieces I would normally do until after the Scottish elections, and I now need some of that time when I go away up to bed to concentrate on the book. It also means I will probably be more succinct on Instagram which will be a relief to everyone I imagine. I have no idea how to post on Instagram from a lap top so it means that each post appears more or less unedited twenty minutes after I start it each night, I don’t even dare to look back on what I have said or only just said after previous months…

Dash the dog has the last laugh on how newsworthy this post is: he has been wriggling on the bed besides me for ages making it very hard to write this indeed. Well done Dash! Dash, You will never feel in the slightest pleased that you will appear in the new book, instead you will wriggle and sniff the bushes and sleep whenever you want to!

(Photo: My contract on the new coffee table, March 2021)