Progress Report : 20th May

Well this week has been exceptionally busy, so I apologise for the lack of new content over the past few days. I promise it has been worth it however! Over the weekend we had some visitors from Belfast, and it was a real pleasure introducing them to the pubs and places in London.

However this meant that my work had to be relegated to the evenings, this led to 5 days of living on about 5 hours sleep a night. Those who know me, will realise that this was a serious sacrifice, I am very protective of my usual 10 hours (I joke of course...)

But what did all this lead to I hear you cry?! Well looking over my words written log, I have tallied a meagre 1500 words for this week so it can’t be that, obviously it wasn’t working on this blog either, so what then?

The London Book Fair : Day 3

Ok, so the final day of the London Book Fair, the day I had been most looking forward to; but turned out to be a regular emotional rollercoaster. 

I did not get off to a good start, my train running an hour late meant that I missed the first seminar that I wanted to attend, which was a shame. It got worse when I was turned away from the door of the second. Any guesses why? Because I was wearing my trademark T-shirt and cargoes? Nope. Because I was a writer in a publishers world? Nope. Because it was massively oversubscribed? Naturally. 

This, I freely admit ticked me off more than a little, it is abundantly clear that the organisers have learnt absolutely nothing over the last few days. To make this worse, I got talking to some of the staff on duty (the ones turning us away) and they said it is the exactly same thing every year. The moral of this story – is if you want to go to a seminar, turn up half an hour early minimum. If you have back to back seminars as I tended to, then you can pretty much forget the second. Sorry, that was a little over stated, they did actually learn something; that having people standing in oversubscribed venues can have a negative impact on health. Their solution, a larger room? More chairs? Nope, just ban people from standing thereby reducing capacity even more.