Need cheering up?

I have just been to The Big Green Blookshop blog - which I found on Fidra's blog. I've been MATing all morning and I really MUST get down to some writing, but if you need cheering up (I don't this morning, but it happened anyway, if you see what I mean) read this post by one of the owners' sons. It's heaven.

The Big Green Bookshop blog has also got a wonderful song called 'Keep on Smiling' on it which bursts from the blog when you log on ... or soon after, and it really does make you smile. So I defy anyone out there with the blues today not to have them changed to whatever the opposite of the blues are. The reds? The rainbows?

And may the Big Green Bookshop open soon. If they can run a blog like this at a time like the one they're going through, then we can all find something to smile about when we're blue.

When is writing also a MAT?

When it's another piece of writing.

I managed to stop writing the short story (the one that was a novel, you remember) this week so that I could resurrect the idea for a children's novel from a horrible first draft written one thousand (well, ten) years ago.

And the reason for stopping? To send three re-re-re-re-re-re-redrafted chapters and a synopsis of the children's novel to Fidra Books's competition A New Book for Fidra. The deadline was today, I emailed my submission yesterday afternoon and now I am worrying about having too many pieces of writing on the go at once (and having to find even more reasons to avoid doing any of them).

But I am the only person who asked me to do this, and so I am the only person I can turn to. Just as, when people ask me how I manage to be disciplined about writing I say, 'If, by seven o'clock in the evening (The Archers, of course) I haven't any writing to show for myself (or research done or thoughts written down), I am the only person I can blame for my pissed-offness at the lack. And I get sick of being pissed-off (and only having myself to blame) at the bottom of the stairs of an evening.

So, perhaps writing will beget writing?

PS: Did you know that Jennifer Aldridge's Ambridge website really exists? How does that work? A real website about a fictional village on a site for a soap peopled with invented characters on the BBC? I am confused ... but I sense a new MAT coming on.