Brex**it

Well - hedgehog has popped his spiny little snout above the parapet again, and it's a different world from the time of his last post. The USA is now being run by a refugee from a clown car, and Britain is obsessed with a mass national suicide project that 63% of the electorate didn't vote for.

If I hibernate again, will it all be OK when I wake up? (No.)


(See picture for a vision of post-Brexit Britain.)

The Vanishing Banana

Here's hedgehog again, as we trundle to the end of yet another arbitrary calendar setting. However, since this happens round about the turn of the year, when the days start getting longer again, I can see some logic to it.

On a totally different tack, which may read the perceptive reader to think that hedgehog has finally gone off his little spiny nut, there's an incredible video linked on the ludamus site, at http://ludamus.co.uk/mathsmuppet/richard-wisemans-incredible-vanishing-banana-illusion/, which features, as you might guess, a vanishing banana. It's a weird optical illusion/conjuring effect, and the reader is invited to guess how it's done.

Hedgehog is baffled, but you, as homo/femina sapiens, may be able to work out this really bizarre trick.

Leeds Met Squandering your Money?

Well, I don't believe it, as Victor Meldrew used to say. We hear on the news that on Monday 4th July, when Leeds United football club was bought back by its former owner, that the creditors would get only 1p in the pound from the new takeover.

We hear also that one of these creditors is Leeds Metropolitan University, who will get back £500 instead of £50,000. Now sums like this may be peanuts to business, but the question has to be asked: what was Leeds Met doing giving money out to football clubs when this money comes from Government grants and the fees paid by its own students? Do they have a moral right to be risking cash like this when it should be used for the educational benefit of the community?

The VC, Simon Lee, may have some words of wisdom on this, because his subject is ethics...

How many students could have their fees paid for £50,000? Quite a few. Hedgehog's spines rise at this. What else is Leeds Met putting money into? Casinos? Who knows.

Saint Valentine and all that

Well, we've had St Valentine's day, and the media are hyping things up even more than usual. The local BBC weatherman, Paul Hudson, was even selling kisses in a Yorkshire supermarket for a quid (or is it a squid?) a time. We can only hope that there was a facility for paying two quid not to snog him.

I'm rather hazy on who St Valentine was (perhaps avid readers of this column can enlighten me?), but he was probably somebody who met a gruesome death in the past, which seems to be one of the qualifications. Are there any ancient saints who popped their clogs in an armchair, with a good book?

We can't blame the media, of course, for seizing on anything that will push up commercial sales of newspapers and items that we don't want to buy: it's in their nature, much as chewing up seals is in the nature of killer whales. Don't we just love the press?

New Year and Hogmanay

Well, here we all are after another blitz of celebration of a calendar change. Hmm.

Today's moan is for what New Year has become, and nostalgia for the now apparently vanished Scots New Year celebration.

Rather than partying from evening onwards, we used to soberly have preparation, but no drinks or celebration until the striking of New Year itself. A few songs, poems, and reflection on the year were in order, and then, when the clock struck, celebrations would be a raising of glasses, as everbody had their "nerdy". (Abbreviation of New Year's Day, you Sassenach morons).

After that, things would become quite lively, with singing, dancing and general getting of stuff down people's necks. Round about 2am, when the initial celebrations were beginning to pall, hardy souls would tuck a bottle in their pockets and start round the neighbourhood, ringing doorbells and first-footing.

What do we get now? Jools Holland? Aargh. (Mind you, this is not to argue for the return of Andy Stewart). IS anyone out there nostalgic for the old Scots Hogmanay and Nerdy, or is Hedgehod drivelling, as usual?

Dot on the Horizon

A small piece of non-progress on the agent front. Having heard nothing since 16th November, I dropped off a message to M to ask if they'd received it all, and they did indeed reply. It seems that they have so many unsolicited submissions to go through that their turnround time will be about three months.

I suppose it's useful writing time for book 2...

The Waiting Game

Firstly, in case all you benighted Sassenachs out there didn't know, the 30th of November was St Andrew's Day (I didn't until I heard it on the radio). Why do people make a fuss over St Paddock's and even St Gorge's Days, but neglect St Android's? Perhaps it's because we Scots are a quiet, unassuming, self-effacing race of people.

Hedgehog waits patiently for agent M to respond: it's now Saturday, and a considerable number of days after the submission of sample chapters and other details. Did it ever get there? Has it been summarily junked on receipt? Is it just at the bottom of a large pile somewhere?

If I write again, asking what's happened, will it be too son? If I don't, how long should I wait before assuming it's down the tubes? Hmm.

On some other fronts, Christmas and all its attendant tasks is approaching like a steam train. Is there time to get all the presents, send the cards, and redecorate the hall, stairs and landing? (More of the decoration saga anon)

Godot Part II

Well, it's now a sharp, crisp November morning, and there's no refusal back yet from the current agents (whom we'll call M, in the best tradition of Bond films).

This, of course, may simply be because M has not yet had the time to dig my contribution out of the slush pile, and generate the standard refusal. However, one day, somebody may actually like it.

It does tend to be rather depressing for the budding author to pop up, bright eyed and bushy tailed, get whacked over the head with a club, and then repeat the performance time after time. Having an ego the consistency of boiled leather probably helps.

Outside, the birds are twittering dutifully, and the cat is snoozing in the best cat-manual approved manner beside me on the table as I type.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Waiting for Godot

If not Godot, then an agent. I've tried now perhaps 5 agents, and have received a polite no from each. Some of the submissions have been conventional post submissions, and others have been by email, which some of them will now accept. The fastest refusal time so far has been 2 minutes, from a email submission where the agent replied to say that their books were full at the moment, and that they weren't accepting any more people.

Once again, an email with CV (not much use, since I want an agent because I don't have a writing background in the first place), a synopsis and the first 3 chapters has been sent off once again, and we wait in hope.

The Novel Continued

Your hedgehog has got his spiny little bottom into gear again, I'm glad to say. In between finishing one load of Open University marking, and starting another (soon), he's picked up on the creative writing again.

Once again, the crime novel Destroying Angel is being sent off to an agent, in the hope that they'll like it. The variation in agent requirements is both astonishing and strange. Some will be happy with a chapter or two and a short letter, whereas others demand chapters, a synopsis, a covering letter and an author cv. If I were an established author already I could see the point of the cv, but why my other job is important to them is a puzzle.

My own suspicion is that it's simply a way of filtering down the applications to a manageable quantitity: if they can't be bothered to send all of this in, then we we'll just read the work of the ones who can. Who knows---if agents feel really swamped, we'll have to compose an intoductory symphony for novels, and send in a video clip of us juggling lighted chainsaws.

The good news is that novel 2 (provisionally The Killer Section) is now getting off the ground and is getting written. Plots, subplots and characters are even now brewing and bubbling in the hedgehog's little cauldron of a brain. Cave lector!

Roman Holiday

Today the hedgehog visited a Roman town. To those of you in other parts of the world, this may or may not sound exciting, but in Yorkshire (the place of the hedgehog's present burrow), it's joost plain daft, as they say here. I'd like to say that it was the old Roman Town of Olicana, which it was, but it's now called Ilkley, which is a lot more prosaic.

There were no Roman soldiers marching up the streets, since I was about two thousand years too late, but once a year there is a Roman day, where people wear cardboard armour covered with tinfoil, and stonk about like a mass formation of wallies. Fortunately, this was not the Roman day, either.

Instead, Hedgehog and Hedgehogette visited several charity shops in succession, bought little or nothing, swithered about cuppas in a tearoom, did nothing again, and came home.

If it weren't for the wild excitement of life, I don't know what I'd do.

The novel and agents situation remains the same. I'm still looking for a nice, kind, good, reliable, enthusiastic literary agent for my crime/detective thriller number 1, while I try to write number 2. You heard about it here first.

I'm also waiting for the news that I haven't won the Arvon poetry competion again, but that will fail to drop through my letterbox later on, sometime in Novemeber.

As they say, "Nil carborundum illegitimi"

October Blues

How on earth did we get to October, 2006? Hedgehog must have drifted off into some kind of aestivation since the last blog.
How is the novel marketing getting on? It isn't. After a few feeble attempts to approach agents, Hedgehog succumbed to the pressures of domestic crises and Open University marking (which is what he's employed at part-time now). Novel1 is no closer to getting to the world, and Novel 2 stagnates at about one page so far.

What your spiny correspondent needs is a good hoof up the prickly rear, which he ought to administer himself. It may happen.

Meanwhile, we trundle through the warmest October that can be remembered. (No frost yet). Just in case you were wondering, the oct part in October means 8, as in the 8th month, just as September means 7th and November 9th. The anomaly is due to Julius and Augustus Caesar (try spelling that as Cesar, my transatlantic friends), who were ruthless, all-powerful rulers who suffered badly from meglomania (so no difference there from today, then).

More rambling nonsense later (perhaps).

A Quiet Sunday

Today, Hedgehog and Mrs Hedgehog have finished off all their Christmas cards and dropped them in the post. At last! This is a task which could quite easily have been completed any time in the past month, but , of course, was left until after the last day for second class post. (Non-Brits can have a translation of this on request).

I am now sitting at my desk in the fading light, with a stripy cat curled up under the desk lamp, pounding this missive into the laptop. It's a quiet Sunday, settling down after a hard frost overnight. Winter cabbages and leeks which have wilted under the blast of frost are just starting to perk up as the temperature slides above zero again.

What will Hedgehog do now? When he gets the plot and his act together, he'll start writing the second novel. Hmm. Earl Grey? Assam? China? Darjeeling? Slurp.

Secret Agents

Having finished the novel (see previous stream of blether in blogs), I have to get it out on the streets. I've trawled through the red book, and the yellow one, for agent names, and have checked the updated lists on the web.

My first agent attempt has been to one who seems friendly, and who accepts, unusually, initial submissions (synopsis, letter and first three chapters) by email as attachments.

Strangely, the major problem was that I'd written the book using LaTeX, a magnificent text formatting system, which will knock beautifully finished output straight into pdf. The real pain is picking my way through the text and taking out all the formatting commands so that it can go into Word. Having tried that and given up in disgust, I tried the Acrobat to Word converter. Beware--it doesn't work.

Finally, I sent the agent a pdf in the hope that this will be acceptable. Fingers crossed, or whatever a hedgehog has instead.

The Novel is Finished!

Yahoo, yo, wahey, whoopee, and jolly spiffing good! The novel was finished at the weekend. At last, I can look back over the 74000 or 84000 words, depending on whether you use a word processor count or Michael Legat's estimation technique for printers.

It's been an unnecessarily long haul, but we're here at last. What I'm doing now is going over the text repeatedly, looking for inconsistencies, imperfect phrasings and general mistakes.

It's at this stage that the really awkward part begins. I need an agent. A nice, kind, agent who likes the book and has a desperate, all-consuming urge to help get it into print. I've trawled through the UK agents' lists, and picked mostly only those who are in the society of whatsits, which cuts it down a bit. The ones who seem to have a friendly approach have been picked out, and I now need to start writing letters to them one by one.

The synopsis seems to be the really difficult part. Should it be one page, or twenty? What do you put in, and what do you leave out? Hedgehog is cogitating...

Acts of God and Earthquakes

Another earthquake, this time hitting Kashmir, and vast loss of life. This always brings me back to the oldest question in the book, namely, is this anything to do with a God, and, if so, what?

If you don't believe, then there's no problem, because things just happen. If you do, then how does it work?

If God is both omniscient and omnipotent, then he knew that the earthquake was going to happen, and didn't stop it.

In a worse scenario, he decided to cause the earthquake in the first place.

Is there perhaps a Devil, and did he decide to cause it, and, if so, why didn't God stop it? (see above)

Maybe God is omniscient but not omnipotent?

The Church, as far as I understand, argues that God does know all about what's going to happen, and at the very least allows the earthquake because he's not in the same moral frame as humans, and because there is a grander purpose that will lead to better things after this shorter-term misery.

There are even arguments that what happens in this material world is less relevant than what will happen later in Heaven.

I draw no conclusions myself, and welcome comments, and pointers to philosophy books where this has all been thought of already and discussed hundreds, if not thousands of year ago.

(Yes, I know about the book of Job, but does it answer any of the above questions satisfactorily?)

Yours in deep thought, Hedgehog.

Novel Problems

Well, as mentioned in previous blogs, the novel is getting further. In fact, it's now about four/five thousand words from completion, which might be three good writing sessions.

This, of course, doesn't mean that it will take three days: there's a lot of procrastinating, which means that it might take a lot longer in real time. Also, there are problems. It doesn't sound much, but it's set in 1995, and since one protagonist had to do something about 28 years before, in 1967, and then take an overseas course with the OU, this is awkward. They didn't start taking students until 1971, and I understand that overseas students weren't taught until the 1980s, which blows a nice hole in the plot. Something's got to give, and if it's not my mind, it has to be a strand of the story.

When it's finished, it has to be revised and checked very carefully, and then sent to somebody somewhere. This would probably be an agent, to whom you send an enquiry first as to whether they will look at it, and then send perhaps three chapters printed off in double spacing, which is some archaic custom in the printing world. You enclose return postage, and they then send it back, saying sorry, whereupon you send it to the next one, and so on.

Does anyone know of any good agents, or, failing that, ones who are daft enough to take me on?

Autumn Leaves

This may be going back a long way, but I seem to remember a singer called Mel Torme who looked as though he'd been moulded in a plastics factory, and who sang "Autumn Leaves". He also trotted out all sorts of opinions about how anyone with long hair was despicable, and how we should all go around in jackets and short hair. This, people, was in the Sixties, when Hedgehog was but a slip of a lad, and thought that such ideas were spot on.

Now, when I look out this Autumn, there's something strange going on: It's the 10th of October, the leaves are still on the trees, and not many of them have changed colour yet. This is weird for Leeds at this time of year, and makes me wonder whether global warming is really showing its true colours now. What do Hedgehog's millions of readers out there think? Have they noticed anything similar? Would they like to tell us about it?

The Finishing Post

Not a suicide blog, but an indication that one project, at least, is nearing completion. The Novel's penultimate chapter was finished last week, and, of course, I thought "Only one chapter to go, so that should take me one more week".

It isn't finished yet. It's strange how we sometimes slow down in sight of the winning post. Also, the plot needs looking at again. Did Andy have access to the room, or was it locked before he had a chance to be there? Lots of loose ends to check. After that, it needs to be stuck in a drawer while I start number 2, and then I need to find a nice agent who will look at it.

I've tried a couple of agents with the first three chapters, but they declined. However, I must say that they were the kindest, most thoughtfully drafted rejection letters that I've ever had. I know they're probably sent to everybody, but these people had taken thought and care in what to say to an unsuccesful author. Good on you, Mr Geller and Mr Trewin.

What else has been happening? Once again, I've sent in three poems to the National Poetry Competition (the British one run by the Poetry Society). It's closed for this year, and winners will be notified by February. The entries are all anonymous, so there's a good chance that we're being judged on merit. Maybe that's why I haven't won it yet.

Enough babble for the now. More on novel when Hedgehog has written it. Now where's my pile of leaves? Yawn.

Hedgehog is Retired!

To be exact, hedgehog is retired early, along with 24 other members of his institution, because the head of his institution is an aerosol (translate that how you will).

It's weird, and a little like being on holiday, but of course you don't go back to work afterwards (hooray I think). All there is to worry about now is the money, and where it's coming from. Ho hum.