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Print: $6.88 Download: $2.72 Scottish family memoir of the 1950s and 1960s
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Print: $6.53 Download: $2.72 Waverley and his friend Holly are visiting Holly's grandmother when they become curious about Cramond Island. It's a different world across the causeway - one where you can slip to and fro in time, and where they have some scary experiences.
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McOgBlog
2008 Aug 30 I look back on my previous post and laugh when I think of the weather we've had since then. It must have rained almost every day in August - not just pretty little showers where you can still glimpse the sunshine refracted through the raindrops, but torrential, tropical downpours alternating with cold northern hailstones. Some days the cats have completely refused to go out, although they then become annoyed with each other during the day and start fighting. I haven't had too much time to notice the weather, thanks to taking part in a Festival Fringe show which lasted from 2nd to 23rd August (not Sundays and Mondays). At first it seemed as if it would go on for ever, and then suddenly the end was rushing towards us. Now it's over and I suppose I miss it! My worst nightmare was that the reviewer would comment on what a waste of space the customer in the purple coat was - but fortunately that didn't happen. We had really good audiences who laughed in most of the right places, and there was a good camaraderie backstage. Although I have a lot of things to do, as usual, what I am focussing on now is NaNoWriMo, which happens in November. For once I have a proper plot idea in mind, thanks to some useful sessions at the Writers' Conference I went to earlier this year. I am just waiting to see if this will help me get to 50,000 words in the month or hold me back.  2008 Jun 11 As the rain pattered on the conservatory roof this evening, I was working at my laptop revising 'Guardians of the Forth' which had stubbornly refused to turn into a sensible pdf file - something to do with page breaks I think. This is the first time it's rained in Edinburgh for a couple of weeks, so naturally I hadn't taken the car into work today and had to come home on the bus after waiting a mere 15 minutes at Roseburn as the buses struggled through the traffic on the Western Approach Road. I blame the tram work! I hope this isn't the beginning of the end of summer for us. It would be typical if we couldn't even reach midsummer's day without plunging straight into autumn. As I had hoped, I am doing a lot more writing now that we have the conservatory.  2008 May 21 We moved into the theatre on Sunday for our latest production 'The Steamie' and it's as if we had never been away! The main difference being that I don't have to take the dog with me this time. I have managed to get a walk-on part in the Fringe show which happens in August. When I say 'managed' I mean I didn't say 'no' quickly enough! I have insisted it's only a walk-on part though. Learning lines is completely out of the question when I have so much stuff cluttering up my brain. Weather in Edinburgh today: distinctly chilly.  2008 May 18 This is one of these times when I realise I need to edit my life and consider deleting some activities that are no longer relevant. For instance, while I was running a drama group in a community centre it seemed like a good idea to serve on the management committee for the centre, but now that I am not running the group any more I am questioning why I ever agreed to take the chair! I don't have enough time for writing because I'm doing things I don't particularly enjoy in my 'spare' time. It is taking me half the weekend to catch up on the (very few) tv programmes I like to watch. I suppose the birthday that has just happened and the recent death of a good friend have something to do with this introspective mood. Weather in Edinburgh today: cold but at least it isn't raining. Plans for the day: help with move-in for production of 'The Steamie'; catch up with my French studies; prepare some writing extracts for a conference I'm going to in June. 2008 Apr 28 So re-vitalised that I've plunged back in at the start of the process not once but twice already, with two new projects. One is a children's book I've been working on for some years, and the other is a 'portfolio' of my late brother's photographs - along with a house, his arthritic Labrador, two idiosyncratic cats (is there another kind?) and his stamp collection, he inadvertently left me his archive of photographs, mainly of Scottish scenery. It seems like a good idea at the moment to publish some of his work, although I may well regret this flurry of activity in due course!  2008 Apr 26 I feel quite excited - I've now managed to upload my book after a long saga of trying different word processors, finally settling for MS Word and wrestling with the formatting requirements, sourcing a pdf conversion program (Nuance) and wrestling with that. Somewhere along the line I printed out and proof-read the manuscript - realised in the process I had forgotten to spell-check! - wrestled again with section headings in Word - all the usual stuff. Re-vitalised by a trip to Disneyland Paris, I've now uploaded everything, interior, cover images, completed the process and ordered a copy all within a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. I just said to my son 'I must finish this and start doing something useful!' but perhaps this is the useful thing and cleaning the house is what is a waste of time..... 2008 Mar 29 It is taking longer than it should, but I am inching towards publication. I have all the text for 'The Morrisons of Alpine Villa', all the images, a front cover and a back cover. In the tiny spaces in my life between work and voluntary work, between family and friends, between studying French and pondering what to do about my other writing, I'm gradually fitting in some essential tasks: at the moment working through the images and greyscaling the colour ones; next will be checking the image dimensions, page dimensions, cover dimensions I need; then I'm expecting to be looking for an old cd containing the full version of Acrobat which I used to have running on my computer and which has now mysteriously deactivated itself. Although not by any means a professional publisher, I do have a little bit of previous experience, having prepared a book of poetry for POD a couple of years ago. Unfortunately my memory of how nerve-racking it was trying to get it right overshadows any recollection of how I actually did it! 2008 Mar 25 Having to take the dog to rehearsals was probably the last straw. I have a very busy life and every so often it just gets completely out of control. I definitely hadn't allowed for the dog getting a part in 'Of Mice and Men' and having to go to rehearsals for it two or three times a week, but it has been an interesting experience anyway!
I'm working towards publishing 'The Morrisons of Alpine Villa' (catchy sub-title - 'Growing up in a Fife village in the 1950s and 1960s') which is an account of my childhood and family. I started writing it after my brother's death, when I realised that I was now the only person left to remember what it was like. After a while I started to add family photographs and now it has turned into something I am hoping a few other people might be interested in.
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