Fifty shades of Autumn

Some heavy writing days have prevented me doing the rounds much this week. Sorry about that. I'm revising the book I wrote earlier in the year. Working in to the small hours, I took it to where I thought it ought to be. It's 80,000 words now. Writing is not painful for me. I've done it all my life and love doing it. The painful bit is bringing a publisher onside. I wish publishers were like blippers and took time to stand and stare. But they're all afraid and they all want the same thing - a rip roaring success.

They don't care that Fifty Shades of Grey is pornographic rubbish. They only care that it sells to an audience that bought it "just because I wanted to know what everyone was talking about."

I could self-publish and may do so, but that would mean I had to organise my marketing, distribution, PR, the lot, and I hate all that stuff. I hate sucking up too and there's a lot of that in publishing and the media. My god, the PRs used to lay it on thick with the flattery when I had a column. But it was all cupboard love, trying to get their client in the paper. One good thing about being in this position is that you know who your friends are and I still have some - here too.

Sometimes you just have to paddle your own canoe. If you didn't guess it, that was the "translation" of yesterday's little teaser. I can hear the groans.

Oh yes, the blip! It's down by the canal again, this morning, when the sun was low and bright and the lingering leaves were shining like new pennies. The picture can barely do justice to what is digested by those marvellous organs: our eyes.

Someone else's poem today, one of my favourites by a poet who would sometimes go from house to house trying to sell his poems, often to people who closed the door in his face:



Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W. H. Davies