TGIF

Thank God it's the weekend is all I can say. This has been the most excrutiating of weeks - total sleep deprivation from the princess being ill, then daddy being ill, and mummy being left to be on call for both. I have been wondering if perhaps I could give Florence Nightingale a run for her money, sweeping around beds of fevered, screaming patients, competently attending and soothing them.

I am now practically hallucinating from a combination of lack of sleep and the fact that I've eaten so many jelly beans this afternoon to try and get through the huge quantities of very dull work I've been doing today.

And tonight Princess O is in her very first ballet performance of "Cygnet Lake" with her fellow baby swans in Nursery and Reception - can't wait to go and coo over them all in their sweet little swan outfits. Shame Daddy didn't fish the letter giving permission to do an evening performance out of his pocket until 8.30 this morning when he told me insouciantly that O had performing arts week next week at school! Argh! The permission slip should have been delivered back 2 days ago!

The tyrany of the school letter is omnipresent in our house already, and she's only just turned 4. In fact every time I seen one of those jauntily coloured missives telling me that "my child" needs to bring this, that and everything into school, or needs permission for something, or that so and so has been transgressing school rules, my heart sinks.

Of course the most important ones are the ones that never even reach home at all, lost in the wilderness of childminder's houses, school bags and men's pockets. And that is why on all but one non-uniform days, Princess O has turned up in full uniform, but on the last day of half term, we were smugly prepared for going back to school, only to find out from one of the other (lovely) mum's that there was still another day of holiday, for which we had no childcare.

Now, I really must go, a swift very cold glass of wine awaits in the pub on the way to the tube, in preparation for the gala performance of Cygnet Lake.

p.s. I've swapped the High Art of Virginia Woolf for Notting Hell, which is quite smug, but rather fun so far. I'll report more later.

The Writing Set

Eek, I really have to leave work, but feel that I ought to keep up with the blogging now that I've started. It seems that blogging is more than just writing and that I need to link to other blogs and websites, and write comments on them too, so I will try and come up with some things as soon as I get half a second to do a bit of browsing online.

Had lunch today (five pound noodles rather than white tablecloths at the Ivy), with my dear friend and co-conspirator in the whole writing/publishing circus. He is like me, a member of the writing damned: the proud possessor of an agent who never calls and an unknown list of rejections from publishers. Anyway, he made me laugh when he told me about going into the loo of a pub with his boyfriend for some hanky panky, and then emerging "discretely" to a round of applause from the whole pub, who had been running a sweepstake on how long it would take!

Still, it was nice to spend an hour agonising with him, knowing we're going through the same thing, and discussing all the tricks that we have both been up to in our quest to get published.

Feel I should make some comment too on the "historic events" taking place in the political world, as I believe blogs should also be topical and relevant. So... I have always thought, and this may very well be a clever trick of the light, that Gordon Brown had all the substance, while Tony Blair had all the style. I'm sure this isn't the case, but I am having a mini hopeful moment that great change for the betterment of the populace will sweep the country now as it was meant to back in 1997. I'll check in on these comments in a year's time to see how wrong I am!

I must say though that I actually feel utterly divorced from the whole process and that they (Gord and Ton) don't really care what we (the people) feel as long as they achieve their own aims of political power.

I've just finished reading "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf (more on that another time as I really must go now) but it's simultaneously made me feel very empowered and utterly insignificant, particularly as far as the world of men and politics goes.

What's new pussycat?

Not much, to be perfectly honest. I am trying to arrange a meeting with The Flying Dutchman, a film producer I met in a very random evening at Soho House a month or so ago, (check out my glam socialising/name dropping sweetie! I promise you it's not like that most of the time, indeed most of the time I am more likely to be found sorting out washing at 11pm than drinking cocktails and engaging in scintilating conversation with dashing young media types. More's the pity.)

So... my idea is simple but deadly cunning: the more demand there is for a thing, the more people want it. Now, I know that I'm not the first person to realise this, but I am hoping that by applying this principle to my book, I can encourage some lovely publisher that it might be worth their while printing it.

I'm also factoring in another important equation (all those years of studying science at school finally paid off), one of money and power. The money element of the equation goes: the more money people think they will make from something, the more they will pay for it. The importance part of the equation is more of a hierarchy - which may or may or may not hold true universally, but which I believe to be the general principal, and that is that films are more important than books. Or, to put it another way, the ultimate goal of any writer (or publisher) is to get the "film of the book" deal.

Now, I hope you're still with me because this is the fun bit: if I can persuade The Flying Dutchman that he thinks the book would make a good film, then surely it follows that the book would make money as a book? Ergo, publishing it would be a desirable and right thing to do. (Naturally the publishing of the manuscript would come at a slight premium if this were the case, but I'm sure I could be magnanimous in my negotiations.)

Thus far, arranging the date has been foiled at every turn (by sick children and international film festivals, I'm sure you can guess which problem belongs to which party), but I'm hopeful that next week it might finally happen...

In the beginning...

Once upon a time, in a faraway land (actually, right here in sunny England if you must know) there was a young girl named Daisy, who was a dreamy sort of a girl, the type prone to spending hours staring out of windows and wishing there was a fire-breathing dragon hoving into view instead of a blackbird and a couple of sheep. This girl was quite good at making up stories, and her imagination sometimes ran a little too far ahead of her rather prosaic life. In fact on a couple of occasions (and for "couple" please read "more times than I'd care to remember") her overactive imagination got her into a more than a spot of hot water.

Anyway, after a childhood of dreaming, the young girl grew up but there was still the little Daisy hiding inside her, the one who had a surplus of ideas and nowhere to go with them, wishing she could write them all down. So grown-up Daisy decided the nagging little Daisy had to be listened to, and she duly quit her job and began to write her first book.

That book wasn't quite the book it should have been (whose first manuscript is after all? And I don't want any witty repartee about 21 year old geniuses winning nobel prizes for literature at their first attempt), not to mention the fact that real life by this time had intervened in grand style (the birth of Princess O, and a return to work to name but a couple of things.)

The birth of Princess O sparked another little gem of creativity though, and book number 2 began to be written (late at night, in between working full time and looking after the aforementioned princess.)

So, here we are now: the book is written (and rewritten more times than I would care to remember), it has a title, and an agent to represent it, and yet.... it remains stubbornly not snapped up in a million-dollar-bidding-war-scramble by a number of top publishers, but instead, gathers metaphorical dust on my hard drive (and on that of my agent) while I wonder what to do next....

And it seems that the next that I have decided upon is entering the world of web 2.0 and the long tail, and starting a blog. So here begins the story of "Daisy Bennett and the Unpublished Manuscript".

I would like to assure you at this point that there will be laughter, tears, some romance (and dare I say it, maybe even a little sex) along the way, and of course a happy ending. But, dear reader, I am as much in the dark about these points as you are.