Blimey, here we are nearly at the end of another week. I’m becoming very concerned about the quality of the comedy on this blog. For some reason, I am sitting down to write on Saturday mornings feeling increasingly unfunny. It’s a bit of a pisser so I do apologise that the joke quality seems to have plummeted. It’s very much I did this and I did that. I must try harder.

In the meantime, if I can’t make it funny, I’ll make it succinct!

This morning there is a sensible reason in that I’m just plain knackered. I went Metal Detecting yesterday and the luck gods smiled on me, which meant we did an extra hour which was probably a bridge too far. It was fun though and there were two hammered coins in that hour so even if I can’t walk for a couple of days it was worth doing! One of the highlights was a coin from the reign of King John … I think. But I got a George III shilling, a really lovely Victorian half crown which is enormous and a long cross penny of some description. We went back to the area where I found the silver … thing … and I found a very knackered Saxon strap end and a medieval stud (or half a hollow button, I’m not sure which) that still had remnants of guilding round the edges, so that was a bit of a bonus.

It has to be said that I am comprehensively knackered though, which is why I am only writing this now. And since I have been metal detecting more regularly recently, usually on a Friday, it might explain why I arrive at the blog a little bit puggled of a Saturday morning these days. That said, I did, until today, have an incredibly alert ten days when I was almost myself. Hence last week’s blog being a bit more zippy. That was ace-tastic and I’m hoping it will come back when I’ve bounced back from my detecting extravagances.

Fiskars is a Finnish company and what I learned, from ordering my space, was that Finnish people might, possibly, be very tall. Either that or they have a Grongolian trading arm, from which I have somehow ordered a spade designed for a larger, stronger species than mine. No. I think probably this is about the average height in Finland.

In the picture the spade looked like a normal metal detecting spade size, so a blade? A business end that is about as long as a normal spade but about half the width and quite curved so it will do nice round holes and won’t flex. The a handle’s usually shorter than average, about seventy five centimetres long – about I dunno, just under a yard in old money. The rationale is, usually, that if you’re going to be dragging it about all day it should be as compact and lightweight as possible. In the picture, the Fiskars spade looked about that. When it arrived … wow. The pointy bit had the same dimensions as a metal detecting spade but it was the same width as a normal one and the handle was loooooong. It came up to just below my boobs. No room in the boot for it, it had to be put in the passenger seat!

So I turned up with this giant spade, but, I have to confess, though it was heavier it was really good to dig with. It did flex a couple of times – when I had the entire cutty/diggy bit buried up to the hilt, but what I noticed was that I got a lot more soil out with each dig. That meant that when, for example, I dug pretty much to Australia only to discover the thing I was looking for was about two inches down in the side of the hole, it didn’t take me as long. As a result, I dug about three times as many targets as I had the week before. Or to put it another way, I kissed more frogs; ergo, a higher handsome prince quotient, so to speak. This would also explain my knackeredness … I dug more holes.

Meanwhile yesterday evening, McMini tried and, luckily, failed to review one of my books. I mentioned a review one of them has on Google play which is complete gibberish – it’s clearly typed on a different keyboard or something because the letters are grouped like words, in some places they are words but mostly they aren’t and it makes absolutely no sense. I don’t mind whoever it was gave it 3 stars. However it is quite bizarre. I’m not sure how it cropped up last night, but McMini threatened to one star bomb me unless I gave him one of my chocolates so I asked him if he’d left me a review on Google, because he has a gibberish thing he does, and I genuinely wondered if it was him.

‘Of course,’ he said, adding, ‘er … no.’ Which made sense, because if it had been McMini he would have used a joke name, as you can see from the ‘review’ he did try to post for Nothing To See Here on my website. I haven’t approved it, but this is what it said:

Phil McCrackin (joke name) says

‘THE HOW IF WHEN IS THE WHAT NO ME GUSTA AH NO PLEASE NO WHAT THE HOW IF WHEN IS HOW TIMES WHAT THE YELLOW PEP’ note the crazy person caps lock on.

The review was this …

What made us guffaw about this is the fact that despite being complete gibberish. We liked that Munich features and also the BBC, NBC, MGM and … Bob. Lots about GB too. And someone has liked it! Mwahaharhgh. Why?

Why indeed, we wondered. Were these instructions from the handlers of an assassin to their asset? Does this say ‘do not throw the perfume bottle into the canal. This is Britain and someone will find it?’ Is it some kind of message from MI6? Did the person to whom the message was sent click ‘like’ to acknowledge that these orders had been carried out? If I ask Google to remove it will some men in dark suits come and kill me? Will they come and kill me for writing this blog? With this paragraph have I just signed my own death warrant? You can see how easy it is for me to write a character like The Pan of Hamgee, can’t you?

Other good news, I have managed to kickstart the writing again. Clearly Wednesday was a bit quiet because once I’ve got to and from Mum’s (via McMini’s school run) there’s not much time. Ditto Friday, because I went metal detecting – but hey, you can’t win ’em all. To get back into writing, I’ve re-started my ten minutes a day thing. In grand scheme of things ten minutes isn’t much but if it’s flowing I carry on. To my delight, I’ve managed to write 5,904 words this week.

Yes that’s as many words as some folks achieve in a morning but for me that’s pretty good. I will probably do ten minutes after I’ve finished this. I am feeling extremely uninspired but there are some A to B bits that I can write which don’t call for a huge amount of inspiration. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plug on with these things, bum in chair, words on screen day after day until it’s done. Thanks to Too Good To Be True, there is a whole new aspect of K’Barthan life to play with; Goojan Spiced sausage. It’s just asking for a wealth of stories about smuggling sausage, forging it and other sausage-related skull duggery. Even better, one of the sweeping this’ll-take-years-because-you’ll-hardly-ever-be-alert-enough-to-work-on-it epics I’m working on now has a much better driver. I was going to have it that one character was trafficking beings, but it was a pretty grim topic for a humorous novel. There is still an aspect of slavery involved but I can temper it with sausage related stuff so it doesn’t get too dark.

It doesn’t sound much, I appreciate, but I am pleased to get some momentum going. Initially, I was slightly concerned that I couldn’t find a lot of Space Dustmen. Luckily, this turned out to be because the beginning is so old that it comes from my pre Scriviner days. I hadn’t realised that I’d been working on that story for so long.

The writing has been causing me a little trouble in that I’ve been trying to push some of the projects on a little before I revert to some Hamgeean Misfit. Especially as Hamgeean Misfit is the one I need to write next to, naturally, with the pressure on, it’s proving difficult. That said, I got 1.6k of the next one down this week so it can’t be all bad and doubtless The Pan will end up delivering some at some point, with disastrous consequences, naturally.

Meanwhile Gareth is still working on the audio and yes, it is still an absolute joy. Wonderful stuff. He’s so clearly enjoying himself. I love it when that happens. You see it sometimes, in plays or films, when it’s just obvious that the cast are having an absolute scream. It adds an extra layer of atmosphere which I always like so I’m delighted. Next, I need to listen to it extremely closely and flag up any typos that need re-recorded or pronunciations I want edited a.s.a.p. so he can fix them up and go on to other things. He’s going to be doing some books with Scottish characters next so he’s been riffing with Scottish accents in mine.

K’Barthan Swearing Quiz Update

When I compiled this, I thought folks would be on it like a rat up a pipe but there has been a surprisingly small take up.

Maybe people are getting quiz fatigue! Or it might just be that not enough people have read all of the books to feel entitled to vote. Or I might just have not publicised it widely enough.

That said, while things K’Barthan do have a dedicated fan base, it is a small one and I forgot to share this on social media, or say much about it, if I’m honest, so I doubt everyone has seen.

However, so far we have six clear leaders, the first two, though, are right out in front.

• Arnold’s toe jam!
• Arnold’s Y-fronts!
• Smeck!
• Arnold’s sweaty sandals!
• Arnold’s armpits!
• Arnold’s underpants!

So there you are. If you haven’t done the K’Barthan Swearing Quiz yet, and you’d like to, click here.