The Cat & The Final Cut

Added on 02 February 2009

This weekend the BBC had a story about a cat which ran away from a house in Bearsden and turned up on Millport two years later....

Seriously, this made the news. The Hollywood movie companies must be fighting each other for the screen option. The cat walked forty miles and got on a ferry. What an extraordinary story. Julia Roberts will already be stretching her vocal cords in preparation for the part of "the Cat", Barbados will already be being primed to double for Millport.

Now me, I've written two books set in Millport, one of them revealing the hidden location of the Holy Grail itself to be Millport's Cathedral of the Isles. And no one noticed. But some dumb ass cat goes for a walk and then gets on a ferry for ten minutes and it's all over the BBC.

The report contained the wonderful line: Mrs R said she had no idea how her cat managed to get away from Bearsden...  Here's a suggestion. It walked. Or it ran. It took a bus. It flew a helicopter. Is there perhaps a wall around Bearsden with not so much as cat flap in it?

The Final Cut is nearing the closing stages of the initial draft. It's still about thirty pages longer than I want it to end up, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem. The next part in proceedings is to let TPCKAM have a read. Now with some writers this might be a pointless exercise, as their wife would fawn over them and tell them that everything they'd written was magnificent. TPCKAM however, suffers no such foolishness. She tells it how it is. She will unleash the dogs of Hell should she think it appropriate. She will be the velociraptor of criticism swiping viciously through the soft underbelly of a badly scripted book. And she enjoys her work.

The discussions at the end of these first read-throughs are never easy, and usually end with me in a bit of an artistic humph. Still, they are always constructive and there's never been a book that wasn't the better for it.

In the meantime I'm going back to Barney No.2 - now entitled The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt - to rewrite that so that it ties in with the re-released book no.1. It's all coming together. Now all we need is some publicity. If only Budgie the Rabbit, which fled our back garden in Warsaw last Easter, could turn up in Millport. Or Barbados.