And lo! there was wifi…

Mike Grist Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Most of a week has gone by and while we’ve had wifi- a little mobile dongle thing with limited gigabytes (10 pounds for one gb!!)- it hasn’t allowed me to make a single wordpress post.

Whaaaat?

It’s true. I tried. It gazumped me.

But we’ve been busy here, using our second week of holiday to try and get this house in shape. The wifi man came, the British Gas boiler man came (sludge in the system but not bad, ancient boiler with lowest energy efficiency rating, can’t get replacement parts, but working ok), and tomorrow the plumber comes and wil hopefully fix the cracked shower tray.

We bought a new shower tray! We bought more paint! we sampled the old paint and the new paint on the walls! We also painted (some of) the garden furniture with weather-proof black paint, stripped the kitchen of all wallpaper, bought stuff, and generally did corralling.

Here’s a few photos:

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Kitchen half stripped. There is still wallpaper at left.

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Spot the difference (wallpaper fully stripped back to plaster, all trash shifted around). I used our clothes steamer to soften up the wallpaper and it came off pretty easily.

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Paint samples. The top right blues will be kitchen. The bottom left grey will be living room. The middle blue-green, drawing room blue, called dance hall, will be second bedroom.

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Here is an experiment painting the kitchen floor tiles. We don’t like this orange, so tried painting it with wall paint (below) and floor paint (above). Weirdly the floor paint has peeled. However neither are really for tile.

So I have bought tile primer, which the floor paint should stick to. We will have a classy dark blue floor!

In writing I’ve been chipping a little away at Mr. Ruins, sprucing it up. I find errors like:

1 – Use of words nobody knows what they mean (I did it on purpose then, but now on reading back even I find it a bit annoying).

2 – Sections that develop character, either through thinking or through fun action, but which do not develop the main plot. This is a challenge for me. Recent reviews on The Last, now up to 46 reviews!, have drawn attention to some baggy, skippable bits in the middle. They were still very positive reviews in spite of that- for which I’m very happy, but yeah. Tighten it up.

I’m fixing these as I become aware of them. I may tighten The Last through the middle. I’m also talking to my artist about new covers. I loved the old ones (and the ones before them too), but I think they suffer from point 2 (above) as well. I’ll go into this more later, and my thoughts on fixing it.

In the mean time, sales are fluctuating but generally dropping, though page reads remain high, averaging 4,000 a day!

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