desperance

I suppose I ought to mention, if anybody's in striking range of Stretford in Greater Manchester, I'll be doing a gig at the library there in company with fellow Writers Fantastic - and Paul Magrs! and Nick Royle! - tonight at 7.00. Sorry about the late notice, but I've been a little, hmm, distrait recently. What with hospitals and dead computers and still-unfinished novels and so forth.

Chapter and a half to go, since you ask. And I won't do much today, 'cos I have to leave soon, and there is small hope of working on the train out; but I might manage a decent tranche of work on the train coming home tomorrow. They are different journeys on different trains; I'm staying overnight with

jemck, and so coming home from Oxford, which is a five-hour run straight through on a service where I've been known to work from start to finish.

Maybe, then. Or maybe I'll just read Patrick O'Brian. Or Glen Cook. (I have to take the Glen Cook, in case I can't collect the next O'Brian from the Lit & Phil before my train goes. I also have to take a heap of books to sell at the gig - "sell" being mostly a euphemism for "unpack onto a table, and then pack up again after three people and a dog have been and gone and not bought anything". Ah, retail...)

Oh, and the news of the dead computer: it's not brain-dead, and may yet be revivified. There's a specific Dell circuit-board that sits behind the power switch, and they tried swapping that out with one cannibalised from another model of Dell and got the machine to boot fine, so they're ordering in a proper one. In the week before Xmas. It could be some time... (And I'm really pissed off with the proprietariness of Dell in this regard, and thinking of getting these nice people to build my next computer for me, so I'll know everything is locally sourced. Or maybe building one myself, so's I'll know how they work at last...)