There are stranger things in life than a bucket of beans.

The NaNoWriMo writing this month is steaming ahead well. Despite having lots of other commitments, I’m finding the time to both meet and excede the totals per day. Hopefully it will produce a few things for the new anthology book I am putting together.

With The long Summer of war now complete I’m finding it a lot easier to produce other stuff. It’s actually quite nice to work on short stuff again, even though I often describe short stories as the Banana Republic of fiction. They might be a little more fun now, but they are still not a patch on piecing together the plot of a good novel!

I’ve been working on some material that stems from stories I wrote and rewrote as a child. I’m not sure if it will come to much, but I thought – with a little encouragement from Zoë – that it might be an idea to lay to bed the old stories I used to write as a very young teenager about time travel. We’ll wait and see whether this idea works! I’ve also been tidying up and rewriting some of the ‘outakes’, for want of a better word, from some of my books. A few pieces have been discarded, but others are going to make the final edit of the anthology.

Why is it that as soon as I start collecting something, then everyone else seems to jump on the bandwagon pushing prices up? I used to collect old tinplate toy trains back when they were worthless junk in the eyes of most people. Then all of a sudden programmes on the television started showing them off and claiming over exagerated prices thus inflating the real world prices as people got greedy. Even now, there is no marlet for tinplate trains, because everything stagnated when prices asked were beyond what people were prepared to pay. This moved on to the collection of old Gossard basques that I began to amass. You used to be able to get them for a couple of quid as old shop stock and clearance. Now they go for staggering money on Ebay. I’m seeing this happen more and more. There is a range of sci-fi books that I’ve been getting as old stock and secondhand in as new condition. They’re the SF Masterworks series from Gollancz, but lo and behold, the prices for the out of print ones have suddenly gone up from a few pence to many tens of pounds. Is this because I cursed them by expressing an interest? I’ve got over half of the full set of 71, but there are a few now that it seems I will never be able to realistically get to complete the set, even though I have managed one or two of the rareties before the prices shot up.

The portfolio section of the Jenny Emily Web is due not one but two new pieces. They were supposed to go up over the weekend, but the webmaster has been very overworked, so I’m told. Still, I’m hoping they will go up this week. They will be a short extract from ‘Bringing home the stars’ and another from ‘The long summer of war’. Both full-length pieces are definately going to be in the forthcoming anthology. I am also informed that there will be other minor revamps to the photographs section and the bibliography section. The photograps in particular are long overdue a tinker. I must admit that with hindsight it was probably a flaky idea to have too many pictures from my modelling career on there given the type of modelling that I did. Still, never knowingly shown a naughty bit on camera yet. As I would say to my Mother: I’m actually wearing more than I do when I go to the public swimming baths in a bikini.

Yesterday I managed to stay up for in excess of 24 hours. I cannot really recomend it. It was just a quirk of having worked through the night followed by having a comitment to go to a meeting at a radio station followed by doing a family meal chez parents. Being awake that long makes me grumpy as well as giving me a headache. It also worryingly exposes the fact that I have had a heart murmur since an early age. When I’vwe been awake that long I seem to be able to feel it murmering, and it is such a weird feeling. I’m told it can’t cause my brain to explode or anything bad like that. I did get a wonderful night’s sleep though last night.