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.
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| Suzy |
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| Henrietta |
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| Phyllida |
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| 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!
