Spring definitely here!

What a rash thing to say. But the seed potatoes have arrived and I now have to divvy them up and distribute them around our compost bins - which are used as storage on our little plots - for the various other plotters who've ordered them. Another plotter is, I hope, doing onion sets.

Two excellent weekends, one down in Edinburgh again partly dog-walking, partly visiting the newly-refurbished museum in Chambers Street. This time I brought home a litre lemonade bottle full of D's good mixed berry wine (I've finally bottled my over-active coffee and elderflower wines, and took them a bottle of the coffee), two large handfuls of potent wild garlic and half of a large and elderly bracket fungus, found on the ground in an almost fossilised condition. Absolutely no research achieved, but the wild garlic pesto is brilliant. The next weekend in glorious sunshine I dug over Allotment Minor and spent most of the rest of the day helping to plant a variety of community fruit trees in our local park - apples, plums, cherries and amelanchier. May they thrive! The weekend also involved a ceilidh including the lethal helicopter dance, but as far as I know no ambulances were required this time ...

Yesterday I took my students for a walk to see a couple of things round the university - they were so excited! Ten minutes fresh air and that has made their lecture. Anything to break the monotony, clearly. Today I sang to one of my classes - this was perhaps a step too far.

Ah, well, meetings and visitors this week, lots of preparation and minutes and reports and things, not to mention the teaching (now halfway through, hoorah, and the last week of term, hoorah, hoorah!), but maybe next week in amongst the seed potatoes I'll get down to some typing. Working title at present: An Abandoned Woman (or The Abandoned Woman? Definite or indefinite? Decisions, decisions.

Fizzing head

I can feel when the time is coming near to write something new. My blood seems to fizz, to sparkle, slowly at first, like a pot put on to boil, my head too starts to spin, to fill up, and shadows of stories flit past me, completely unrecognisable but completely thrilling. If I'm unlucky, it builds up and builds up and I just finish in a week with a headache, a night of strange dreams, a fit of depression and nothing whatever to show for it. But if I'm lucky, and focussed, and have the time to channel it at the right moment, into a new idea or into the development of something already thought of, then it can mean a week of excitement, scribbling at every opportunity, a breathless rush, and a new plot or a new episode or a new person is there, alive on the page, almost illegible in places with the sheer speed of writing but the best, the best feeling in your head that you can ever have.

Broad beans planted in the kitchen. Five percent of the next novel (whatever it's going to be called) typed. Allotments calling to me, seed potatoes ordered or chitting. Currants badly needing pruning, raspberries too. But a lecture to do in an hour ...

Print on Demand!

A damp day after a few days of virtually June-like, shirt sleeves weather, but finally Death in a Scarlet Gown can be printed on demand! It's available from Amazon.com, not .co.uk, which seems a bit strange from my perspective but works for Amazon. Sales of the e-books continue to rise, thanks everyone! and thanks for the kind reviews for Death in a Scarlet Gown.

I've finished reading the next book - its original title was An Unkenspeckle Woman but someone has said in no uncertain terms that no-one's going to understand that! It's the Scots word for inconspicuous, not well known, and I rather like it. However, the title is now under debate. 'An Inconspicuous Woman' seems odd, somehow. The story is set in Fife, mostly around Letho, the village where Murray has his country home: there's a hot summer, an unwelcome visitor, a charming stranger, a swimming accident, a quarrel over a manse, some reflection on young women who fall from grace, and an architectural disaster - and of course a murder. Now to type it up.

But then there's teaching to do. I've just submitted my exam papers for the external examiner to examine (what they're best at), and have just been reminded that they need resit papers as well. Oh, blow. I struggled a bit to write them in the first place, and then lost a memory stick with the first version of one of them. However, I suspect that second time round won't be as bad now I have a good idea what I'm doing. And after all, I have - oh, five days? - to do them, along with a lengthy meeting tomorrow out of town, two more meetings on Sunday, and two days' teaching and a hospital appointment in between - no problem! Who needs sleep? (well, I do, and probably more than average!).

So having said that, I'd better get on!

Swamped.

I'm in a borrowed office on a borrowed PC as my poor overworked laptop was declared dead yesterday after hopes that a new hard drive would be the answer. I now have a new (old) laptop but as yet can't attach it to the internet, so I'm feeling somewhat frustrated (and I don't even think I use the internet that much!). I've acquired another class to teach, following the unplanned descent of the stairs by a colleague (believe me, I wasnae there, I didnae do it), and haven't finished writing the lectures for the class I have, despite my best intentions. I came the heavy lecturer today, which I don't often, but the tutor before us in the classroom overran by five minutes, and five minutes before the end of my lecture a couple of dim-looking students wandered in, closed the door behind them and then stood looking vacant, and were then followed by three more. Apparently they couldn't tell the difference between their class and lecturer and ours. Sometimes I lose hope! Anyway, it was explained to them with heavy sarcasm how the clock worked and how they weren't supposed to come in until the big hand had passed the 12. One apologised, the rest just looked thicker than ever.

There's just one more step to having Death in a Scarlet Gown on CreateSpace - unfortunately for some reason I couldn't get the proofread document uploaded, so I'm hoping that perhaps the new laptop, when it's talking to the internet, might work better. Frustrating when the goal is in sight!

It's unseasonably warm, with daffodils sprouting and birds (notably the raucous oystercatchers) beginning the spring mating dances. Apparently it's going to turn cold again this weekend. Over the last couple of weeks I've looked out the window to find a dozen fieldfares staring in at me (slightly unnerving), seen a buzzard outside an urban school, been flown over by a flock of curlews, seen a black pheasant (I'm absolutely almost sure) and counted three dead badgers on one country road. Allotment Major has been secured, hoorah, for another year! and I've started making the mandatory sign for Allotment Minor. Soon it'll be digging time again ... or at least trying to burrow through the impacted earth of the old bowling green on which Allotment Minor is made.

I'm collecting onion skin for dyeing again - I need loads but fortunately we rarely have an evening meal that doesn't involve an onion. I also have plans for retting nettles this summer for fibre - I want to make paper, anyway, but I'd really like to spin and weave or knit nettle fibre which is absolutely beautiful. I won't have time if I'm running back and forth here to use the internet!

The Proof Arriveth

Oh, my goodness, what a thrilling moment! Electronic books are all very well, but this is the moment I dreamed of, the moment when the actual, material, solid, paper-based paperback arrived through the door and I saw it in the flesh for the first time and touched it and opened it and there were my characters on actual printed pages ....

Excuse me a moment! I think it's all too much for me!

I have to go out shortly, but despite the fact it's been sitting by me on my desk all morning, I don't think I can leave it here - I have to take it with me!

embedded in self-imposed depths ...

It's a beautiful if very chilly day and I'm writing lectures - four and a half done, seven and a half to go! I seem to have involved myself in slightly too many knitting projects at the moment and there's wool everywhere: there are three separate scarves, a pair of socks, a woolly hat for seafarers, a rug and a jacket, and then there's a crochet blanket and two woven wall hangings, one of which is not going as I had hoped. Most of the projects are just in their infancy, which means that actually finishing something, with all the boost to the morale that involves, is quite far off! I knitted a canary over Christmas and have the wool to knit a hen, and I have a dozen more projects I'd like to start. I normally try to restrict myself to six knitting projects at a time but somehow the needles ran away from me! More Fairisle might well be next on the list - but then there's that lovely Norwegian book, and the Australian patterns, and that semi-Aran one I downloaded from Etsy ... Some of the things I've done are for sale and some for gifts, but often I'm just tempted to keep the things myself (too many jerseys now) or they haven't quite gone as I'd planned and I'm forced to keep them myself. The sales are on and wool is irresistible, so selling some things has to happen so I can buy more wool. We have here a very good charity which collects craft stuff, sometimes used or half-used, for onward sale, and their wool is temptingly cheap and far too abundant. Oh, dear, life is too short!

Sales (of books) are going well this month: I think I'm benefitting from the post-Christmas 'Santa gave me a Kindle' rush still, which is lovely. Thanks to all of you who have bought any of the books! I'm still waiting for the proof copy of Death in a Scarlet Gown which appears to be making its own way here, possibly by raft, from America. Ironically, once it's checked I have to tell a friend in America who has sworn off electronic books for life, so I've to get her to print it on demand! There is no escape!

Plans for more visits to Edinburgh in the near future and perhaps Fife for more research. The fourth book is set in Fife, near Cupar (no doubt I'll find that Shirley McKay's is somewhere similar! It's quite alarming - I really hope she doesn't think I'm trying to copy her in some way. I wonder if we knew each other at St. Andrews? Her second book is, so far, terrific - but deals with the hero coming to terms with his father's death and consequences. Spooky, as I say.).

Best get back to the lectures while I can - it's going to be a horribly busy term!

Happy New Year

A very happy New Year to all - ours was a quiet one as usual. Old age kicking in, or perhaps fumbling in in comfy slippers.

The new Sherlock (Steven Moffat's version) on the BBC is very good - clever and witty. Some weak endings, but I do like seeing poor old Watson getting a word in edgeways and the occasional revenge in this version.

Back to lecture writing for the new term though, as we abandoned the cats for the weekend to go dog-walking with N & D, Number One Cat feels that cat therapy is much more urgent. I have tentatively begun rereading the next Murray novel, as I think I said before, but have made no more progress over Christmas. Instead I've been scuttling through an Elizabeth George (I do enjoy her writing and I admire the clever way she manages to sound almost convincingly like a British author, though I still think her characters' names are sometimes a bit off) and am looking forward to P.D. James' Death Comes to Pemberley, as well as the second Shirley McKay Hew Cullan book, Fate and Fortune. Apparently her hero is off to Edinburgh in this one, with the first one set in St. Andrews - I'm feeling slightly spooked! It's all the stranger as hers, to me (I don't know when she wrote them but they came out recently), seem much newer than mine but are set two hundred odd years earlier. I wonder did we ever meet as students?

And speaking of students, back to the lectures. I wish I'd known, as an undergraduate, how much it means to the lecturer when a student in passing says thanks. I'd have said it much more often!