With less than two weeks to go, my launch party is getting more organised. A visit from the caterer tonight and we are going to have another discussion on Friday at the hall. At 8.30 a.m. I will have to go there in my nightie. I will no doubt see dawn break.
I telephoned the off-licence today, too, and organised drinks, etc. How nice it is to tick things off my list. And I chased one or two of the recalcitrant potential guests at the party and pinned them down and forced them to say whether or not they were coming. We are now at between 80 and 90 guests, so getting pretty near to a definite figure.
Oh and in addition to that, I've booked our holiday, booked the flight, and a car to take us to the airport.
What I haven't done is clear the contents of my desk, which are getting higher and higher again, while I've been making telephone calls, etc. The Winchester Writers' Conference brochure arrived, but I can't throw that out until I've decided whether to submit things to the competitions. Goldenford are putting in an appearance there. Irene and I will be there on one of the days, and Anne on another, so come and say hallo to us.
We're also doing a talk at the Guildford Institute in May and I'm separately giving a talk on self-publishing at the Creative Writing Class, also at the Guildford Institute. Anne in the meantime, has been getting articles all over the place. In one of her articles, she mentions that she has put in an order for a copy of her own book from Amazon, and they couldn't get it for her. She did it as a test, but it just shows how hopeless they are. Any book with an ISBN can be obtained. My daughter and husband run a book business and are constantly seeking out books from obscure publishers. That's not to say that getting books from Goldenford would be difficult for any reader or bookshop, because we have an account with Gardners, who act as our main distributor and who supply all branches of Waterstone's. Amazon are just being lazy and creaming off the easy stuff from the top. I had this confirmed myself when one of the family (who I don't see very often) told me they had tried to get one of my books - The Fruit of the Tree - via Amazon, and it had never been sent. It's not a Goldenford book, but it's easily available from me. I've had orders from bookshops all over the country, some of them via Gardners and other wholesalers. It makes me very cross that Amazon have such a high profile, but can't be bothered to behave like a proper bookseller.
Tomorrow, I'm off to the dentist. It's time for my six monthly checkup, but the tooth I had such problems with last year is still not quite right. I suspect another bit of tooth has broken off, but I don't want anything drastic done. I'm hoping that the dentist can just patch it up.
My two books on the go at the moment are Irene's Darshan and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. I am the second editor of Darshan, so am reading carefully, but since I have heard the first part of the book at Guildford Writers' sessions, am very much looking forward to the latter third of the book, and the conclusion, which I haven't heard yet. Black Swan Green is, I think, the best of the most recent books from my reading circle. The tale is told by a thirteen year old boy with a very authentic voice - both amusing and appealing, even though I don't always understand his teen language. Funnily enough, when I started reading, I found echoes of my recent bullying story - which takes place on a school bus - even though I hadn't read BSG at that time. It just shows, there's nothing new under the sun.
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