Don't ask me why

So you're obviously on the edge of your seat waiting to find out how the meeting went, after my insomniac torture last night...

You're not? I can't believe you're even reading this, then - be off with you, go and check out tmz.com or some such gutter/stars service area.

For those of you that are left - and hello to both of you - it went surprisingly okay, thanks for asking. Don't ask me why - I think grabbing just enough hours to get me to about ten past ten this morning served my brain sufficiently.

Tonight the bliss of my new pillow - and perhaps trialling it over such a key night was, in retrospect, a mistake - will be interrupted by a 6am alarm to get us to the Eurostar station at St Pancras in time for the 8am train to Brussels, where we will change onto a domestic line and hop off an hour later at Bruges. Two days of deep chocolate research lie ahead. I went for a preparatory 6-mile run this afternoon, after the big meeting: my legs didn't complain, having been carbed up on luscious fresh pasta and pesto the past few days, but the rest of me resisted like my handbrake had been left on. That's what 4 hours sleep really does to you. How do Olympians relax sufficiently the night before their competition to get the rest they need to perform to the max? Is that what all those sponsored condoms are for?

So off I go again. Maybe I'll check in more often. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll get back to Six Wives, which has been brewing a long time now, but seems ready to hatch. Or to LDF, which is still in need of a central purpose on which I can hang all the fun stuff. Or to something new, thus ensuring that I begin more than I ever finish, and keep repeating the mistakes I've made since the mid-1970s when I first began and didn't end a story. In those days, you could bolt "And they lived happily ever after" or "And then s/he woke up" onto the last narrative beat, and still get a silver star from the primary school teacher. They were a forgiving bunch. But those days are gone.

And so it goes...

Yes, I'm not dead. I'm just a typical blogger, excited at the outset, yet swiftly overtaken, like footprints in wet sand, by the sea of day to day life. Crappy metaphors like that are perhaps why nobody has purchased my book and a half. That, plus their sentences are too long and their vocabulary too advanced for the target age range, plus I don't have a target age range, I write to please myself, via the genre, if you will, of children's fiction. At the moment, at least. Plus a whole bunch of other reasons, like I don't know how to reformat and re-up it since evil italics appeared, apparently of their own volition, in the original version I uploaded, causing a reader to complain that it didn't look right on...whoa, what was that? A reader? Did you say my story had a reader? Somebody looked at The Nose Plumbers' Tale long enough to spot some formatting errors? I love you, Alice B Toklas, or whoever it was that opened my e-book, even for a brief moment, to glance at the complex assortment of letters and paragraphs and ideas, just long enough to go, "Eeuurrggghhh, that looks horrible..." and get straight onto Amazon's customer service department to complain and have it removed from e-sight at e-once.

And with my return, you'll note for a post title we take a step down in the pantheon of songwriters, reaching - some fathoms below Neil Young - the equally not-dead-but-not-producing-new-stuff-either-so-perhaps-that's-as-good-as Billy Joel. I'm thinking you don't need my opinion of Billy's work, but heck, this is a blog, so (a) I can write what I like, and (b) you're all probably so young you weren't around when he WAS putting out albums (remember them?) - so here's My Billy Joel in a children's fiction length paragraph (with inappropriate, or at least irrelevant, content, and a moral, which always puts them off):

Billy was a Piano Man. He practiced his scales and made up some tunes. He married three women (so he was only half the man Henry VIII was) and wrote songs about all of them. For me, his best wife was number one, because the song he wrote about her was best of them (though number two's was the biggest hit). But for me, his best album by a long way is 12 Gardens Live, a double CD of tunes he really cared about when belting them out at Madison Square Garden in 2006. This was 13 years after his last studio effort, which it didn't (and doesn't) sound like he much cared about. The well had run dry - tragic when you think how he went on to dampen his well, no matter what Elton John advised him. Still, for twelve nights at the Garden, the old Billy was back - a semitone lower in voice, but...well, I wouldn't mind being able to play the piano like that. (In fact, some people will tell you I can play the piano like that, and they're kind, but I'd need to invest time and practice, enrol in Ben Folds 101, stuff like that. Much easier to continue to vamp like I'm wearing Matt Prior's gloves...) My cousin met Billy's daughter Alexa when she guested on a radio show in New Jersey a couple of years back, she sang a couple of her songs, shot the breeze...Cuz said she's a very nice girl, but armchair psychology such as I practice has no place on this blog, so let's leave it at that, and wish her well in her hair shirt career choice.

Anyway, having returned, what do I have to say? Why indeed have I re-emerged? I'm a private soul, blessed with little need for anonymous affirmation. Fact is, I couldn't sleep. Why couldn't I sleep? Guilt? Indigestion? Neither of the above. I have an important meeting tomorrow, and traditionally I cannot sleep the night before an important meeting. I believe it to be a form of self-sabotage. I would like the meeting to go well - it's not as if I'm trying to book ahead an excuse for it going terribly. I'm not a teenager. I can take failure on the chin, or almost any other part of the anatomy you care to name, and accept the real reason, whatever it is. I would like the meeting to go well. So I don't know what's going on. And despite the help of those nearest (not right now, she went to sleep in another room in order to help) and dearest to me, here I be. Listening to the birds cracking dawn (and jokes, maybe - I don't speak bird). The meeting is not until midday, so I can sleep in. But once my brain knows this, it resists sleep for a little longer. Complicated, huh. I shall have to go into the meeting baggy-eyed, slow of thought, a beat or two behind where I need to be (like a Billy Joel song circa 1993, in fact). I shall muddle through, inexpertly, insufficiently inspirational, in the way I do. Don't go changing... (what did Billy Joel say to the traffic light as he approached it at speed...?)

And so it goes...

Winterlong

Okay, one more Bernard Shakey song title to flash at ya...

Had a fantastic new year's eve, which - you'd probably concur - is a rarity. Friends and family over for dinner, friends stayed, family went home and to other parties, and we ate lamb and played music and didn't watch Big Ben but then the kids dashed into the TV room to see the fireworks, then some of us chatted till 3am, somehow managing in the morning of Jan 1st to go for a walk in the Great Wood, mainly for the benefit of Biscuit the Golden Retriever puppy. Then we said goodbye to our NYE friends, hosted another family for 90 minutes over lunch, then drove to Colchester in the rain to see our third set of friends for 2012 who were having an open house at their place; and we're hosting two more families tomorrow, which is the extra bank holiday, so action-packed barely covers it. The dishwasher we bought when we got married 13 years ago this March is certainly living up to its brand reputation for rugged durability. Whoo-hoo for us.

And here I am at 0030 on Jan 2nd, blogging rather than catching up on sleep. Or doing any useful writing either, I might add. Reports today indicate another sale of "Teen Cinders" - the author was in fact present at the time, driving the sale and presumably banking a further 29p (eventually) - but more significant must surely be the continued geyser bubbles of ideas for "LDF", which sits at the stage where it must not be talked about, or it'll evanesce into the atmosphere without ever being written. So further reports need to be curtailed, and just put down in the first draft.

Okay, let's change the subject: tonight we ask, is Ben Nevis proper preparation for Kilimanjaro and the Seven Summits? Is anything? And when might winter end sufficiently to go up and do it?

No hidden path

Not all these posts will be named after obscure Neil Young songs (although - lightbulb - what an interesting option)...most will be self-referentially titled in some form or other, since blogs are, when they're not about anything else, all about the writer, coming out and showing themselves, or projecting whatever's good and wholesome and will help them shift books.

On which subject...I should be getting on with writing the next in the Perkis Histories series: Volume 2 "Six Wives", since that's next off the rank after "Teen Cinders" and Volume 1: "The Nose Plumbers' Tale". And - unlike the past two and a half years, when I first had the idea - that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Couldn't embark on this journey through the past (tick) and into the future without linking to the reason this blog has been birthed:

http://amzn.to/rxtyl1 (if you're in the UK) or

http://amzn.to/sWpfH5 (if you like your e-matter sourced from the USA)

If you stop by here, stop by there. I wish I could offer you a slice of cake and a pot of coffee whilst you read the thing, but even Borders couldn't make that pay, so how I'm supposed to pull it off with - for now - only one short volume to entice you (although my triple chocolate cake does unquestionably trump not only their bankrupt offerings, but those of any still solvent chain of beanery/bookstore emporia) is anyone's comment. Look forward to those suggestions.

I'm the son of a successful man who was averse to publicity (a.k.a. advertising), and who wanted his name known only by the cognoscenti of his industry (I say 'industry', it was more a dusty subculture, but he got what he wanted). So I'll feel my way into a higher profile than that, and we'll see what pops out in the course of these posts - assuming I manage a longer run than I did last time (c.2006, when I was a soon-to-be-recovering TV and film producer). Eight posts, I strung together that time.

When I work out how to play it, you can tick the boxes for your preferences. Please choose from the following:

-family diary (think Outnumbered without the archness, or Modern Family without the

-recipes (I wasn't kidding about that cake)

-extracts of writing

-book reviews

-songs I wish I'd written

-life skills technical support, a.k.a. agony uncle Q&A

-anything you can't get elsewhere (please specify, and come on, this is the internet, you can get anything)

-the niche I decide to occupy

And on that momentary taking of control, I shall post, and get writing.