Cormorants at Clumber

I’m always happy to announce my successes so it seems fair to tell you I’m now in one of my worst ever slumps, with multiple rejections cascading into my in box. It’s been eight rejections, five acceptances in the last month. My forecast was that I’d manage around seven or eight acceptances. It’s not a big difference, but I actually thought I was writing better than I had done for some time. The editors obviously disagree.

However, I’m going to resist the temptation to produce one of those posts full of introspection and numbers and comparisons to previous years.

I’m just going to go away, warm up the pizza left over from last night and read a 1920s whodunnit on my Kindle. I enjoy finding fault with them and this suits my present mood. Yes, it will have coleslaw with it, and fruit for afterwards – I’m not a complete nutritional disaster area.

I’ve been watching The Good Wife on TV, Julia isn’t interested and it, as something I can watch without her complaining that she’s missing things. When we watch together, we watch Bull. I used to watch Law and Order – Criminal Intent at one time, but the increasing quirkiness of the detectives was so annoying that I stopped part way through the run. The thing with watching so many programmes so close together is that you start to realise they are interchangeable and you begin to recognise the plots.

This became even more noticeable when I started telling Julia how I would handle the story. Ten minutes later, I would find that was what the scriptwriter had done. I’m hoping that if I keep watching I will eventually dream a series of historical crime novels which become a series and make me rich.

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve had similar thoughts . . .

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