It's noisy out there

The light has just about completely faded away (yay for British Summer Time!) and I've had my window open, on account of having filled the room with smoke while cooking tea, and the birds outside are making a heck of a racket! It's times like this that I wished I'd paid attention to my dad's occasional lectures on the subject of birds and what they do, so that I could identify which species is making that screeching noise, and which is doing that sort of beeping. That's the kind of thing it's hard to learn without spending your life sitting in hides wearing a hat with twigs sticking out of it, peering through binoculars at tits and boobies.


As for the book-writing, I think I probably am going to at least put together a proposal for the "How To Improve Your Memory" book that that publisher wanted. In fact, I've already got one I wrote waaaay back in 2003, the first time someone asked me to write a book for them, before I decided to turn them down for various reasons that made sense at the time. Maybe I'll dig that up and see how bad it looks.

In the meantime, I've picked out another publisher to try to tempt with How To Be Clever - this will be number 5, and the scores so far are one outright rejection, one no reply (the one I sent the wrong covering letter to), one 'we'll print a book by you with a similar title if you rewrite it completely' and one 'we're not printing that, but we'll print a memory book by you'.