A nifty line

Every so often, when you're writing, a line appears that comes so wonderfully formed, you think someone cleverer than you wrote it. In the first chapter of my next book, due to be published in November, there's this line:

He put a stopper in the top, and popped it in his upper pocket. 

It's a bit like a line from a poem, except that this is an ordinary prose story. I love the way the letter p appears all over the sentence, along with the letter t, and the rhythm of the words in the sentence.

Did I say what the name of the book is? Nope? It's The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret - a sequel of sorts. It's a sequel in the sense that it happens about a week after the first book in this series, Grimhilda!, but there are only two characters from the first book who make an appearance in the second. A couple of others are mentioned, but that's it. Almost an entirely new cast...!

Goin' Dancin'

Another article I’ve published recently on the Net relates to my dancing experiences – when I say ‘my’ dancing experiences, I mean dancing with my wife. We went to a course in what we thought was ballroom dancing several years ago and discovered that they not only taught ballroom dancing but square dancing. And both forms of dancing were the ‘called’ type, where someone calls out the next move as you go. It’s very common in fact, but we’d never come across it before. We actually enjoyed it a lot, until it just became too time-consuming. It was great exercise, and both of us got quite fit doing it. We even travelled to a few other centres to join in square dancing conventions with other people.
However, those who were really into it would travel to Australia and the States and Canada and all sorts of places to join others who danced. And people would come to us too. That sort of thing was rather beyond our pocket and our amount of annual leave.
It’s time we got back into something along those lines again, as we’re both feeling distinctly unfit (in spite of all the work we’ve done on the house recently in terms of getting ready for carpet laying) and need something that gets us up and running.

Nope, that's not us in the photo: though we occasionally came close to such finesse. The photo's by catface3.