How’s your lockdown going? Well, I hope.
I haven’t left the house since March 11th and now that I actually could go outside to exercise I think I’ve forgotten how. To go outside. I haven’t forgotten how to exercise. In fact I’ve been quite serious about exercising at home since my left knee stopped doing an impression of a basketball made out of pain.
After more than a month of procrastinating my author website is now live. I can no longer remember why I thought a website was a good idea. This is one of those occasions where I need to have faith that past me had some idea what she was doing.
I rewrote the opening of Project Kindness as a result of some feedback I got from an editor. I think it’s better but I can’t be sure. I’ve sent it off to a couple of agents so we shall see if it does any better than the previous one. However I do feel that I’m approaching that I’m close to running out of agents to query with this novel. Then I have to decide to give up on it entirely, query small press publishers, or publish it myself.
It’s hard not to feel like a failure. I know, intellectually, that a book can be perfectly fine and not get published because it’s the wrong book at the time but that knowledge is hard to internalise. Even when I do succeed in taking on that lesson I feel like it’s still my fault because I should have finished it earlier and then maybe that would have been the right time. I also can’t help wondering if perhaps I am the wrong person to have written it.
Zeppelin Report
2020 continues to be all kinds of weird. The people of Bristol decided that it was finally time for Slave Traders to get in the sea.
The Overton Window is moving so fast that we’ve seen a few people get flattened by it. One moment you’re the controversial pundit the loony lefties love to hate and the next moment you are lying in the dust, sans Twitter account, wondering when good old fashioned racism got so controversial.
American cops are whining about being held accountable for their actions and they still don’t seem to have noticed that the debate has moved on, from prosecuting them when they break the law, to removing their jobs entirely and replacing them with something else that’s fit for purpose.
The Arctic is on fire. Again. But there’s so much going on this year that people have barely noticed. Sorry global climate disaster, you’ll have to come back next year.
Trump has been virtually untouchable thus far. None of his enemies have properly laid a glove on him. Even the impeachment seems to have been little more than an irritation. Americans are on the streets demanding change, the police are increasingly out of control and any other President would regard that as a crisis. Trump doesn’t care because it doesn’t affect him directly. He’s just using it as an excuse to throw his weight around.
So it was until this weekend when the teens got him with the cruelest of all mean girl tricks. It appears that a loose coalition of K-pop fans and TickTock kids came together to convince Trump that he was super popular and a million people wanted to come to his party. So he walked out onto a stage unprepared for an arena that was at one third capacity while outside his team were dismantling the overflow stage his campaign paid for.
That must have hurt. Probably not as much as getting tear gassed, or pepper sprayed, or getting shot in the eye with a rubber bullet, or being thrown to the ground hard enough to cause seizures or even crack your skull. So it’s not like things are even yet.
And finally… the shambling reanimated corpse of the Conservative party continues to pretend that shouting vague slogans counts as governing a nation through a double crisis. Everyone, including the Government, has used up their Brexit stockpiles just surviving Coronavirus but they’re not going to delay Brexit because… reasons.
Have they actually said what those reasons are? Even if Brexit was unambiguously the right thing to do when we decided to do it, and everyone was 100% behind it at the time, now is not the time to be going ahead with it. Imagine you were in the middle of packing to move house. If your town was hit by a horrific storm, and there was a flood warning for your street wouldn’t you call to cancel the moving van and tell them you’d reschedule once the water had subsided? Apparently Boris would be floating his sofa out to the semi-submerged van and complaining when the driver wouldn’t try to start it.
The Stick of Doom speaks 