Slow Start

Added on 14 November 2007
I suppose that if the last entry was Day One, then that makes this Day Six, more or less. Six days in, and if I'd been writing the Bridges of Madison County, I'd be half way through. Actually, I haven't even started yet. Not in any substantive putting pen to paper kind of a way. Haven't written a word, although I've done a lot of thinking. That's a start, of sorts.

I wrote the new blurb, which is on the book page on this site, and will soon, hopefully, be on all the book sites of the world. I can see it now...Lost in Juarez, sales rank, 2,600,784. I've also dipped my toes into doing research on the internet on freedom of speech. By God, there are a lot of strange people out there. I'm probably going to get in over my head with this subject, but then, I can always use that by having my main character - Lake Weston - feeling that he's out of his depth. Lake is not going to be me, despite the Bob Dylan thing.

We were watching Sky News the other day - we're not proud - when the London warehouse fire story broke. For twenty minutes or so the presenters were breathless with excitement, because a big plume of black smoke over London could have been anything. Very exciting possibilities for 24hour news. To fill the information gap they encouraged people to phone in and say what they could see, and they were rewarded with a succession of characters who were eight miles away calling up and saying, 'I can see lots of black smoke from my balcony.' Then out of the blue they got a guy at the scene. Not emergency services or anything, just a guy. He was totally deadpan, completely played down the incident. Just a fire, no explosion, derelict area, unlikely to have been anyone hurt, emergency services there, no panic. Killed the story stone dead in thirty seconds. With realism. I thought, I want that guy on the news every night.

Then I thought, maybe there's something major going on and this guy is an MI5 plant, sent onto the news to kill the story...

That's how these things work.
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