We are what we repeatedly do….

Posted on September 23, 2010 at 9:02 pm. 1 Comment

There’s good timing and there’s bad timing.  Recently back from the ten day marathon that is the Southampton Boat Show, good timing is when you walk onto a stand just as champagne is being popped and all the people you need to meet are there and free to talk. 

Bad timing is when, after a long day at the show and arriving back at our friends’ house in Hamble, we discovered that our hosts were out for the evening and our spare key was safely attached to Perry’s car keys.  Which were on the dressing table.  In the house.  Great.  At least, thanks to the wonders of wifi, we were able to check emails whilst parked outside the house.  But this had to be the night that, after a quiet few weeks on the email front, my inbox unleashed a flurry of messages with last minute edits and queries on my book, currently at the typesetters.  Sitting in a car in the dark is not the ideal place to write the back blurb for the book, remember what cover design we finally agreed on, and suggest a way of getting rid of the blank page after chapter 7.  I did have my working copy of the book with me – but it was in the house, along with the password and log in details for the project management programme that we’re using to communicate between all those involved.

I did the best I could in the circumstances before we gave up and headed off to the pub for some much needed supper.  So if you wonder what the two figures lit only by the glow of a laptop were doing in a Fiat Punto in Hamble last Wednesday night, now you know.   By the time we finished supper, our hosts were home and we were able to go inside and relax, making sure we didn’t forget the keys again.  Of course, for the rest of the week my emails, diligently checked every evening, contained nothing urgent at all.  That’s life.

The boat show gave me the opportunity to have a productive meeting with my bosses at the RYA.  I’ve decided that the two nicest things a publisher can say to an author are:

1.  “We’d like to commission to you write a book about…….”

2.  “We’d like to hear your ideas for the launch party…..”

It’s the nine months slog inbetween these two conversations that are the hard bit.

If my frantic laptop activity in the Fiat Punto succeeded, I’ll have an image of the front cover to post on the blog fairly soon. Meanwhile, here’s me looking zonked at the show.  The wine is purely medicinal.

And the title of this blog?  Apparently Aristotle said it, along with ‘excellence is not an act but a habit’.  I can’t think of anything remotely witty or profound to say about it for now, so I’ll quite while I’m ahead.  Time for another glass of something, I think.