comedy

comedy

Trouble At T’ Mill

Published by Owen Jones on 16 July 2015
Trouble At T'Mill

Megan Faces Derision

Trouble At T’ Mill?

Trouble at t’ mill?

You can say that again. We’ve got another two to four days of being without mains water. My wife only recently paid for a new crop of chilli peppers and spent a week planting them out, and the young seedlings need a regular and plentiful supply of water, otherwise, in this heat, 35c, they will wither and die within 24hrs.

At the moment she’s taking water by the bucketful from a stream a hundred yards away, but so are lots of others and the water level is falling fast. It rained a little today, but not enough. I collected two buckets of water from our house roof, but at least that’ll keep the toilet clean.

The two Germans staying in the village are going back home tomorrow. I haven’t seen them for a few days, I heard that the father was sick. I hope it wasn’t a result of the lack of water. I imagine he’ll be glad to get home if it is.

Sales in mid-July are still spectacularly lacklustre. This is the middle of the holiday season, and so traditionally the time when more books are sold to read on the beaches and in the back gardens of the world. I personally sold more every month of the year 2015 so far than I am predicting for July, if it carries on like this.

Where did that phrase ‘Trouble at t’ mill?’ come from? I remember the first time I heard it was on in a Monty Python’s sketch on TV in the Seventies. It was about a family which owned a cotton mill in north England, I think. I loved Monty Python’s in those days, but I can still watch them, they haven’t dated too badly, not like many of the others, although Dads’ Army and Steptoe are still brilliant too.

I’m offering a short-time discount of 50% on three of my most popular books too, just LIKE this page and the URL’d together with the coupon codes will be revealed:

[mgh id=”s1″ msg=”Click a LIKE button to release the codes” des=”These coupon codes are valid until August 14th, 2015″]

#BehindTheSmile – coupon code: BS36T – http://smarturl.it/DHonSW?IQid=MPSpost15-7

#DeadCentre – coupon code: XL76W – http://smarturl.it/DConSW?IQid=MPSpost15-7

#TigerLily of Bangkok- coupon code: UP65T – http://smarturl.it/TLonSW?IQid=MPSpost15-7
[/mgh]

All the best,

Owen

Please take a look at my books and LIKE the page (it really does help, you know?)

Podcast: Trouble At T’ Mill

Filed under: , , and Tagged: , , , , ,

Progress

Published by Owen Jones on 6 July 2015
Progress

Progress

Progress

The concrete boys were back today and surprised me yet again. Instead of just laying storm-water drainage, they are resurfacing the road (lane) to a depth of five or six inches with reinforced concrete. Now that’s what I call progress since no more than five residents own cars.

It just goes to support the idea that Thailand has borrowed a shed-load of money (from China?) and is trying to spend its way out of an (impending?) recession. I don’t know, like I said the other day, but it seems that way to me.

Still progress is progress, and it may ease flooding in our lane for decades (the concrete certainly won’t be worn away any time soon).

I am also making progress with my books. I have edited and re-edited that new book, which i eventually called ‘Andropov’s Cuckoo’, I am happy with that now, so I have started to submit another, a book I wrote in 2014, called ‘The Disallowed’. It was meant to be a gruesome vampire horror story, but I didn’t have it in me and it came out humorous.

I started reading and re-editing that yesterday, because I couldn’t get out, and made sufficient progress to be able to submit it to a couple of agents looking for comedy today (agents generally only want to see the first three chapters to decide if they might be interested in the book).

So, that’s more progress. It takes them four to twelve weeks to say yea or nay, and I will have it re-edited by Wednesday, then on with the next. I’ll do them all before I start anything new – probably. I do so prefer writing to what necessarily has to follow it, if you are an indie publisher.

However, I already have seven stand-alone books or series, with thirty books in the series, so any progress selling them could make a huge difference to my circumstances.

All the best,

Owen

Please visit my bookshop

Podcast: Progress

Filed under: , , , and Tagged: , , , , , ,