Now that I have finished Mr Fowler's captivating "The Victoria Vanishes", I am moving on swiftly to P.G Wodehouse, a Jeeves Omnibus, no less! This one bought at the rather wunderbar Sanctuary Bookshop in Lyme Regis at a very very reasonable price.

Oh, no! 

This movie is tackling similar themes to those in my second book, The Book of Thoth, albeit in a different way. It's a ghost story, set in an isolated house in the aftermath of the First World War. Like The Book of Thoth! 

There is also a short paragraph about a new BBC drama, Parade's End, which will be set around the time of the First World War. It will have Benedict Cumberbatch in it! One to watch as well, then!

BBC article below:
THE AWAKENING


It looks like The Book of Thoth will take months to complete - and we're talking about 6 months or so, now - so I won't even be taking advantage of the interest in First World War stuff... 

These drive me nuts. We now see those mistakes in newspapers, magazines, posters, ads, job ads, etc.  And I am not even a Native English speaker. But grammar was hammered into my head from age 5 so I understand how language works... Go on, make a bloody effort! Or ask me, I can explain slowly. 

Matt ArtPix's 11th November blog is particularly poignant this year. Matt's interest for the First World War started in very strange circumstances when he was 17. I hope he will write about this experience once day as it is quite disturbing. But ever since, he has tried to understand what happened to those people and their very personal, very individual experiences. MATT ARTPIX 11 11 11 11

I will borrow from Matt's blog:

Great Men

The great ones of the earth
Approve, with smiles and bland salutes, the rage
And monstrous tyranny they have brought to birth.
The great ones of the earth
Are much concerned about the wars they wage,
And quite aware of what those wars are worth.

You Marshals, gilt and red,
You Ministers and Princes, and Great Men,
Why can't you keep your mouthings for the dead?
Go round the simple cemeteries; and then
Talk of our noble sacrifice and losses
To the wooden crosses.

© Siegfried Sassoon, 17 August 1918


Unfortunately, as Matt says really well on his blog, we keep being obsessed with history but we don't learn. The phony wars our leaders are waging these days are useless, and don't even get me started on the religious authorities always trying to hijack remembrance day celebrations, when it is well documented that most of those men had lost their faith if they had one in the trenches. 
Absolutely disgusting. 

So years after year people "remember" then they go back to their shallow little lives and our government try and find yet another country to which to send their idiotic planes. Because they are so ineffectual in sorting out their own countries, they use "wars" to distract our attention away from their ineffectuality. 


My second book, The Book of Thoth, is set 7 years after the First World War and if I do not tackle it directly, the effects of the war play on part in the story. 

As a fitting tribute to the Occupy movement and student fees protests, here's a picture of the next group to join the movement:

3,400 words in two days...

The Book of Thoth is back on track... I hope I can keep it up for the next two weeks because afterwards I will have too much work to spend much time on it until Xmas... Things are really kicking off now in my story and I really need the help of my First World War specialist! 

But sometimes I really wonder why I have made this book so complicated...