Friday 27 April 2012

Ladies who lunch


There are certain advantages in being married to a novelist. I explained to Marcia that I had taken a few photos of persons dropping in to the garden for a quick snack that I thought I would share with you but a title for the blog eluded me. She was extremely slow in coming up with the one above — somewhere between twelve and fourteen nano-seconds at a guess as I didn’t actually time it. Anyway, we have Suzy the sparrow hawk, Henrietta the heron and Phyllida and Fiona the pheasants. No question but that Suzy and Hen are in their finery but Phyl and Fi could have made a bit more effort.
Suzy
Henrietta
Phyllida

Fiona

It is the time of the year when the first rumblings of the next book (that is the next book to be written, not the next one to be published nor, indeed, the one after that) can be heard. At this stage they are distant and difficult to interpret but Marcia feels that there might be a family similar to Jack, Hannah, Toby and Flora in The Children’s Hour. There again, that could just as easily be a red herring.

My guess is that we shall be talking about these people rather a lot in the next few weeks and driving around trying to find out just where this book will be set.

Most days something nice turns up in the post (we will ignore those boring envelopes containing bills) and today was no exception. Come to that yesterday was pretty good too. Today it was a contract with Marcia’s publishers in Estonia, Varrak, covering two books: yesterday it was the arrival of two copies of a new edition of The Summerhouse from Germany. More properly we should call this Het zomerhuis. It s a very nice cover but I must admit I can’t quite work out the thinking behind it. Marcia and I agree that model is probably a dancer because she has such a wonderful posture.

THE TADPOLE TIMES

First my thanks to Claire Rudkins for letting me know that it is a cloud of tadpoles. Very appropriate.

The weather has been terrible as all of you who live in the UK will know. The odd thing is that it seems to be affecting the tadpoles as well as the plants that I somewhat stupidly put out a couple of weeks ago. I may be wrong but the tadpoles are eating a bit less and there is little sign of growth. It follows that there is little to tell you about this week. Now, all we need is about eight hundred names so that each one can know what it is called before they are released in a few weeks time. Suggestions by post written on a ten pound note, please. No more than two names per tenner!