Where am I now?

It's now ten days since I set up in business as a writer and publisher. I am a sole trader with the business name of Brook House Enterprises. How far have I got?

Well, there are ideas and ideas and ideas and some of them are taking shape.
The Brook House booklets on local history are really taking shape. I have set myself two deadlines:
1) Friday 7 December - launch a five-part series based on the articles I did for the Craven Herald in 2002 titled Ingleton's Dickensian Characters.
This will co-incide with late night shopping night in Ingleton which usually has a Dickensian theme.

2) Saturday 26 January - launch a five-part series called Voices of Old Ingleton at St. Mary's CofE.
This will also be a whole weekend given over to Old Ingleton History as part of Hope 2008.

The articles for newspapers and magazines are still at the ideas stage. I have a Wordpad document in which I put down all my ideas. I open it every day and look at the latest ones. Most are viable in the cold light of day, some are not. But the viable ones don't come to life.

Why not? Well, there are several reasons:

1) The theme is a current topic, and these go out-of-date extremely quickly.
To get published, I would have to write my thoughts down straight away, send it
off by email to a daily paper and hope it caught the feature editor's eye.

2) I haven't studied the market and can't find an outlet.
I have one in mind about using Plusbus tickets when I travel by train and I even have a travel mag I would like to write it for. But I just don't get on with it. I hate to use more than two syllables but I am a slave to procrastination.

The George Hope novels have got stuck after three chapters. I have discovered that my main character takes centre stage only in chapter 2 so I need to put him firmly in his place in chapter 1. The third chapter reads more like a play than a novel.

It is a conversation between George and his best mate in the pub. I find that dialogue comes a lot easier than I thought it would. It just seems to flow. But now I have to fill it out with description. O well it's all a learning curve.

I know I have committed myself to Miss Write. Our wedding took place on 22 October 2007. I think I am making progress in our relationship, but this is not a honeymoon.