A better quality of spam...

I've just been offered an executive suite for 50 people at the British Grand Prix. It is spam, but it's a genuine offer, and - like the people who keep trying to sell me dried chillies by the shipping-containerload - it does play to my interests; I love Grand Prix. I'd love to have a party at Silverstone. Just, not a £40,000 party...

Not enough stuff to make a post...

...but let's do it anyway.

It was only today I discovered there is a craft of teabag folding. Some discoveries are innate with disappointment: for no, they do not fold teabags.

The boys have discovered a new way to test their prowess: leaping for the carrier-bag that I stuff with other carrier-bags, to be recycled. I have this hanging on a coathook in the hall, at about my head height. That's about six foot up. The boys have slashed that poor bag to ribbons. Yay boys.

Meanwhile, I have been upstairs working on my revisions. I am on page 402 of 490. When I started there were 616 pages, so we have measurable progress; even so, however hard I worked this evening, I would not finish it tonight. So I will probably slack off now. Sod it.

Bugger

Just heard from my editor at Del Rey, that, um, he isn't any longer. He's leaving. Just a day, two days before I deliver the MS. Sigh.

We have, of course, been here before. You can't avoid it, if you spend any time in the business; editors shift around constantly. I think I've been less lucky than most, in this regard: I once had a novel that was commissioned by one editor, accepted by another, edited by a third and published by a fourth. With four concomitant changes of publishing plan, from crime novel to horror novel via literary/mainstream.

And the thing is, books never do as well with foster-parents; they do their best, I'm sure, but come right down to it, this is not their baby. They didn't commission it, they didn't ask for it, it's just been dropped on their desk for their attention.

And in this case, of course, it's a trilogy. Which makes for a long relationship, almost a shotgun marriage. This happened with my last trilogy too, that the man who commissioned it was not the man who published it. That was, um, catastrophic.

I am not feeling very positive about this. Does it show?