It is time to get serious about finishing those books. I have even received a message from someone via Goodreads asking about progress on the sequel to 'George and the Rabbit' (obviously he is into prosodic S&M). After the underwhelming success of 'George' I quickly started on a completely different book, 'Barna', which was fictional account of an artist I chose to study during my art history degree, whose life is shrouded in mystery and but for a few short accounts, all we have are his paintings.

However, I kept getting bogged down in the writing as this was a proper book that needed a lot of researching, unlike 'George' that was just a stream of unconsciousness. So I put that on the back-burner and instead started the sequel to 'George', 'George and the Armadillo'. That got off to a flying start and fairly quickly I had got to 30,000 words and 165 pages. I even felt confident enough in it to send chapters to my lovely copy editor and writing mentor. But then the business went tits-up and I lost all my motivation. I haven't written a word on the book for over a year now.

As things picked up at the end of last year and the future looked brighter I started looking at the books again, staring at me lost and alone from Windows Explorer. I decided to restart an old project, a book on analogue video, thinking it would help to promote our company more (I was thinking of offering it as a free download). But today I opened up the George file and started reading it. It's not so bad. I've forgotten how I intended ending it though, if indeed I ever had the notion, and I don't write notes, I just keep everything in my head (or in this case, not).

I had also got bogged down in how to promote the books. My first book, 'Home Thoughts' we did everything ourselves, including getting them printed. That is why we can't use one of our bedrooms as it stacked to the ceiling with boxes of the bloody things. I can't give them away. So for the second book I used CreateSpace to save all the publishing costs, but it just languishes there with a zillion other tomes, unloved and unbought. Yes, I should find a publisher, but rather like the agents who continually irritate us with offers, publishers seem to do little that you can't do yourself, and the chances of finding a true publisher are remote and I get enough kicks to my crutch from the business to want more from a sack of abusive rejection letters.

But first, get the thing written, and then think how to sell it, or don't bother selling it and be happy to hold the fruits of my incompetence in my hand. Yes, let's do it. Maybe a little e-mail to the New York Times to tell them to reserve a space at number 8 on their best seller list.