And then Hemingway punched Orwell in the gob!

So, things are going well.

My first novel, Caught by the Storm, which is in its final draft, is with Penguin, Random House and Allen and Unwin which is an exciting albeit daunting and, yes, maybe a little testing, experience. They say this kind of thing can take two to four months and in Penguin's case they don't even get back to you if they don't wish to proceed, which is a bit naff, but fully understandable given the volumes I'm sure they receive.

To keep myself occupied I am conducting The Ouroboros Project where I write a poem a day for as long as I can. It's quite a good challenge and gets my mind flexing quite nicely. On top of that I have taken to writing a chapter of one of the greats each and everyday (three days so far). I've been just straight up copying it word for word into an empty text file. Thus far I've written a chapter of Down and out in Paris by my concise hero, George Orwell, a chapter by the big dog Hemingway from For Whom the Bell Tolls and one chapter from a modern master (my opinion of course) with  Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. I would rather copy out The Road, but I just don't need that level of bleakness in my life at the moment to be honest. The focus of course is not to rewrite it word for word, it's more of a meditation exercise to honest so catching mistakes etcetera isn't paramount. Just practice, I suppose. I'm starting to think about an exercise where I rewrite the chapter after I have copied it down as that could flex my writing muscles further.

But yeah, I am totally enjoying these two creative endeavors whilst I have on the back burner, numerous novel ideas and a couple of short stories bubbling away.