A momentary pause in proceedings.

My recent Annibirthsary (thankyou Tom, Oxford Dictionary peeps still to confirm its inclusion next year) has gotten me all reflective. Although a celebration, there was some sadness in there too. I’m also a little bit agog that I’m doing this with a year behind me already. And some truly lovely things have been said by readers that I’ve come to respect and admire, without any kind of bribe or blackmail. A new state of being for me.

My previous Editorials have been along the lines of a Thankyou, a Review and a What’s Next. So ta very much all, so far so good and here’s my loose plan;

Coming soon to a fake newspaper near you! The Lockwood Echo will be introducing its new Travel Section. Would you like up-to-the-minute information on the best exchange rate deals? Current travel advice? Insurance quotes for various holiday activities? Yes? Well, you’ve clearly never read The Echo before and have come to the wrong place, because that all sounds incredibly dull and I could not be arsed to look that stuff up for you.

What you will find is anything that I can remotely link to a travel theme, but mostly expect to find Camping Trips and How They Went Wrong. Putting together my series ‘Then There Was That Time…….’ threw up so many memories of camping trip failures, that I decided they deserved their own heading. Camping is code for ‘Let’s invite disaster into our lives, miles away from home, at the mercy of the elements‘. Many common catastrophes will be recognised by anyone who has been on holiday, anywhere, anyhow, ever, but I hope that employing that age-old comedic technique of ‘it’s the way I tell ’em’, I can promote a giggle or guffaw as I recount true tales of our misfortune and mishap. We laugh about them, so we don’t mind if others do too.

In other news, I’m in the process of tweaking a little diddy ebook I self-published last year. I use the term self-published casually, within a properly constructed sentence to make it sound like I have any chuffing idea how that happened. It was one of my more random and reckless decisions of 2017. I’ll give you a clue as to how reckless it was; I had no idea at the start of the process what ‘insert page break’ meant. You might not either. But apparently, if you’re writing a book, electronically, it’s quite essential. Hyperlink? Pixels Per Inch? FORMATTING??? Several thousand hissy fits later and ultimately choosing ‘Wing It & Co’ for publication purposes, it was revealed to the world. Yes, the WHOLE world. Because I have no confidence when it comes to doing normal stuff, but too much confidence when it comes to doing stupid stuff. (That, by the way, was someone else’s observation. It’s pretty accurate.) I vaguely remember in the middle of it all that I had to register myself for tax purposes in the United States. How did I do that? I don’t know.

The upshot is, proud as punch as I am having wobbled my way through it all, occasionally lunging at a chapter title that refused to centre, it didn’t quite look as I’d hoped. It really is such a dot of a thing, but as I’m charging 99p (it’s for charideeeeee), the least I can do is make the photos in it large enough to see with the naked eye. Watch this space for the re-launch. Oh, it’s about dogs. Homeless, ownerless dogs. It’s cute.

Other than that we’ll just bimble along as per shall we?

You can go now.

Take care of each other out there!