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Review
27 March 2006
Okay, let's have a log with all good news in it, shall we? Enough of being anxious and gloomy and ill, let us celebrate the day.
The cat has discovered eating; he has been eating for several days consecutively, and as m'friend Gail says, he may well go on doing so now for some considerable time to come. Yesterday I had people for curry, and he ate considerable quantities of chicken. Fond of spicy foods, apparently; fond of cartilage. Oh, and neck-of-mutton bones. (I've just been reading Mapp & Lucia, and Georgie says he wouldn’t eat neck of mutton if his life depended on it; fond as I am, as one must be, of Georgie, I have to say he's wrong about this. A neck-of-mutton curry, despite sounding just ultimately British Raj, is really rather a wonderful thing, for all that I made it up.)
More good news: I have had my first review for Bridge of Dreams, and it's a corker. In Emerald City, edited and largely written by the wonderful Cheryl Morgan - www.emcit.com, should you be interested (and yes, you should). I worry a little that it may be premature, as the book won't be out even in the States for another six weeks or so, but maybe it'll encourage early orders. (I said this to my editor, and she sounded a little cynical about the usefulness of online reviews; and then Cheryl e-mailed to say that someone had undertaken to buy the book already, on the strength of the review, so that's my first real sale, and the third good news of this report.)
The timing's really good too, because I've just reached that point in vol two where I'm depressed by what I've done and daunted by what I've still got to do, where the deadline looks impossible and the work-so-far pointless, drab and empty; but no, I'm not breaking my all-good-news rule, because the good news is that a positive review just turns all that around in a moment. Now I can believe in it again, because someone else has believed in it and said so. Sheesh, how frail am I? But these are the crumbs that we live on.
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.