It's Been A While, I Know...

I've been a little absent from my blog for a while now. Admittedly it's for good reasons. In the past month I've finally completed all the work on my novel and started sending it out to agents. Thus far I've had three rejections, but there's plenty of agents and most of them only take on one or two authors a year; throw in the present current financial climate and it's a uphill struggle.
To offset any downside to the rejections, I've started work on a new novella, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away which I'm currently 40-odd pages into. It's going extremely well too. The writing feels good to me and a niggling problem with some of the 'weird stuff' was rectified this morning with one of those 'eureka' moments. I had to get out of bed to make some notes and now the core of the story has some much needed internal consistency. Even the weird stuff needs internal consistency...

Aside from that, I have a lot of plotting done for another full length novel (should the first one not find a home, I'd like a back up book to be ready to go), as well as notes for a follow up to the novel that out in agent-world.

In between bouts of writing, I'm also enjoying the Wimbledon this year. Tennis is the only sport I can stand to watch without lapsing into a coma. All those Russian female players certainly aid the enjoyment too. Plus we finally have a Brit who can play. Andy Murray absolutely slaughtered Troicki today on Centre Court...

I'm currently half way through Carlos Ruiz Zafon's excellent The Shadow of the Wind. This was a huge Spanish bestseller about a 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books' in Barcelona, and the mystery of an author's life and death. It's a great book; deeply evocative and full of mystery and atmosphere.

And on the less cerebral side of life, I'm currently enjoying Dead Space on the XBox - hugely entertaining and downright scary stuff on a monster filled space station. Whack on the surround sound at night and this is jump out of your seat good. Looks beautiful too. I've also picked up TopSpin 3 too, which is an excellent Tennis sim - much more fun than Virtua Tennis - and a lot less effort than actually playing tennis...

And we watched Priceless tonight. An fantastic French comedy starring the luminous Audrey Tatou. She plays a scheming opportunist who dates rich older men on the French Riviera purely for their money. When she mistakes a shy bartender (the fanbulous comic talent, Gad Elmaleh) for a millionaire, this lovely movie unfolds like a modern day Audrey Hepburn movie. Tatou is gorgeous and the film shimmers with French Riviera heat. And it's absolutely hilarious. I recommend it highly.