All Better Now

I'm a much happier chappie at the moment, having made some decent headway with my story proposal. Apologies to any of the people who've tried to talk to me recently and been met with little more than a distracted grunting ...

The breakthrough came thanks to a pair of newspaper stories retrieved from my clippings folders. While the proposal itself doesn't bear a great deal of resemblance to these stories, they were exactly what I needed to nudge my mind in a different direction and get me out of my rut. Suddenly those hours spent snipping away at old copies of The West Australian seem eminently worthwhile.

Invitations to pitch for books are so few and far between that my biggest dread is always that the deadline will roll around and I'll have come up a total blank, with nothing at all to submit. There's little worse than a missed opportunity. Having a synopsis close to completion, however, takes some of the pressure off, so I'm also feeling more positive about a couple of the aborted ideas I had last week. The editor has been kind enough to allow writers to submit more than one story idea, so with luck I'll be able to get a couple of pitches in and hedge my bets.

After all, you never know what's going to bubble to the surface between now and the deadline ...