Ye gods and little fishes, I’ve actually managed to get both drafts of the minutes out which were cluttering up my desk earlier in the week. Double hurrahs and put out the bunting. Joy abounds indeed. Lucky Joy. However, it’s rather shortlived as I’m now faced with a massive annual reporting project. Dammit. Ah well, best see if I can make sense of it one way or the other and maybe it’ll all become clear by the end of the day. Hey ho. Don’t wait up ...


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I have re-designed my main website, so click here if you’d like to take a look:

www.carolinerance.co.uk



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I don’t think I remembered anything about yesterday’s Bible readings – it was as if any sense had been sucked from my head by a mental hoover. A common occurrence really. Which caused me to write this:

Meditation 2

Black marks on snow
signify nothing; the electrical
link from the word
to the brain

is missing today. Tell me:
when does meaning start?

...

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Today I am hosted by the wonderful Sue Guiney on her blog, and we're talking about fiction and religion, something I had never thought about before she asked me her thought-provoking questions. A taster:

In a way, the fiction writer's “What if...?” that he or she asks himself is similar to the Talmudic rabbis, who discussed and pondered every possible permutation that occurred to them, every possible behaviour or situation that someone might come up against, in order to formulate a Jewish answer – or more than one! I have studied a little bit of Talmud and find it fascinating, the rabbis were often highly imaginative in the scenarios they thought up and in the ways they formulated solutions to problems.

For the rest of the interview, click here.
For more details about my Virtual Book Tour, visit TheWhiteRoadandOtherStories.com.

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Am utterly suffused by Monday gloom today, groan. Maybe it’s the time of year. Or (more likely) probably just me. Double groaning. Am so bad today in fact that I am barely able to communicate with the outside world at all and have taken to opening my eyes wide and sighing as a means of conveying the angst. Words being a concept entirely beyond me at the moment. Somebody pass me the smelling salts. The Quiet Life pills and the Rescue Remedy just ain’t working, dammit ...


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I have been Internet-less for the past few days, it was wonderful to get back online today and find 21 comments waiting for me, thank you all for your congratulations, it means so much to me. Must pay in that cheque...

(Just a note: all the links in this blog post open in a new window, so feel free to click without fear of missing anything here!)

In other nice news: I heard about Eyeshot last week through the Literary rejections on display blog, which was talking about the editor, Lee Klein's, legendary and lengthy rejection letters. I thought to myself, Well, let's get me one of those great rejections, and I sent off a new and strange flash story.

Instead, two days later, I got this:....

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A writer friend, doing the last big revision of her new novel, emailed to ask me what I think of present tense narratives. She's used it for the main-frame structure because it's a story of urgency, pressure on the main character and action, with excursions into the backstory in past tense. But a couple of her trusted readers have said they don't like it and think it would work better all past tense. It does seem to be a matter of taste, but equally that suggests that tense has a fundamental effect on how the story is read. Since I've been known to say I, too, dislike purely present-tense narratives, my friend asked me what I thought. And this is what I found myself saying:

"I'm not mad about whole novels in present tense, put it that way - and I do think it's largely a taste thing. I sometimes say that a solidly present-tense narrative makes me feel I'm being tapped repeatedly on the head with a teaspoon for the length of the novel. If there is a central problem, (and as the extract from A Secret Alchemy demonstrates, I use it myself and I don't think it goes without saying that there is a problem) it's that present tense is by definition unreflective.

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6S

A big thank you to Robert McEvily in New York for publishing 'Off the Wall', a small yet significant step off the road to obscurity.

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I'm not really sure I was fully in the mood for last night's concert, though I did think that the choir sang magnificently. Suffice it to say that Belshazzar's Feast isn't a piece I'd rush to turn the radio on for, but I have to admit it was a bold choice beautifully conveyed. Oh, and in case anyone's asking, I do think Delius is dull. Sorry, but that's just how I find him. If only A Walk to the Paradise Gardens could be remixed as a Jog to the Park, and I might be a tad less bored by it. Just a thought ...


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Lord H and I have spent the day wandering around Hampton Court Park and Bushy Park. And what wonderful sections of parkland they are. We managed to see the grey phalarope (see full post for links - well worth it as they're very nice birds!) that we went in search of very easily indeed, hurrah! And what a pretty and surprisingly small wader it is. Astonishingly tame too, but that appears to be the nature of phalaropes. They are the robins of the water world. So another tick for our new bird list, Other new birds and therefore new ticks to the list (gosh indeed!) included several red-crested pochards, and a veritable plethora of goldcrests. Which are delightfully small and a total pleasure to spot. We also caught sight of the usual suspects, including Egyptian geese, long-tailed tits, huge numbers of ring-necked parakeets (that now-typical south London bird) and a higher than usual amount of jays. Ooh, and plus a stonechat or two as well - which gave us great excitement when we thought it might actually be a whinchat, but 'twas not to be, alas. So nearly another new bird, but not quite ...


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