Some Acceleration Point That Turned Out To Be

Quarantine Project Day 36 and 37

Look, don't brag about how you have hit something called the acceleration point is my advice, because if you do your computer will explode, or implode, or whatever they do that means that you have to call up PC World who want seventy sobs just for saying hello plus component parts and then you call up Wayne down the road who will fix the whole thing for a tenner plus component parts. 

Needed a new Graphics card, apparently.  Must have been looking too hard at those pictures of Dr Who's new assistant.

After listening to Vivaldi for ten minutes you select your option and here's what you get: 'Goooooooood morning this is Pete at PC World, we're happy to help you with your computing problem today etc etc etc zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Here's what you get with Wayne:          'Huh?  Yeh.  Bring it round then.  Bye.'

Sixty quid for all that Vivaldi Plus Pleasantry corporate crap sung in your ear.  Same component part fitted, but by a geezer in a pink shirt with a provocative name badge.

Either way you can't post your blog update.  It made me long for the days when surly service was the norm.  I mean we still get crap service at PC World and everywhere else, but we're now paying sixty quid just for the privilege of being tricked into thinking it's not crap service.  So with all that I still managed 1287 words on my laptop.

            As for day 37, I had to go back down to London.  My Russian publisher the deeply erudite Alexander Guzman had arrived for the Book Fair just a little late, but since he'd travelled overland by train from St Petersburg, through Warsaw and Cologne, that could be forgiven.  And since the train journey from Leicester to London is just a little over an hour I could hardly not.  Anyway he arrived with the interesting news that they had bought out a second edition of House Of Lost Dreams, which is somehow my lost novel, set on the Greek island of Lesbos where I lived while writing my first book.  But I'm thinking: why has that one sold so well above the others???  In Russia?  Answers on a post-card please. (Oh you haven't read it?  Yes I have copies for sale here etc etc zzzzzzz.) 

So after a few glasses of wine with Alexander, and another glass of wine later with Simon Spanton, my friend and fantastic editor at Gollancz, I got on the train, took out my laptop to do a bit more on the novel and I thought, sod it.  As you do some days.  People are forcing me to drink, and Day 37 is a duck's egg.

Some acceleration point, and 0 words won't knit the baby a bonnet, as my grandmother used to say.  Not when you only have THREE DAYS LEFT.

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")