Not that I'm making excuses but... Okay, I am

6th February 2007

This is an announcement for those who follow this blog regularly (yes, all four of you).

After reading the adventures of onehandwaving, the editor of The Straits Times' Review section kindly offered me the chance to do a fortnightly column for the paper.

The pieces will be much the same as the entries in this blog - though probably with fewer elephants - but they'll appear under a different byline because, for some reason, people don't believe that onehandwaving is a real name.

Unfortunately, because of the crossover in material, I'll be blogging less.

Okay, less than before.

I don't want to stop onehand from waving - and that second novel really needs to be written because the characters are threatening UN sanctions if I don't - but the demands of a fortnightly deadline will mean less time and fewer working brain cells for other forms of writing.

To be honest, though, the column hasn't started running yet and may not get off the ground because:
1) Review writers focus mainly on political and economic commentary
2) My proposed topics for the column include beans and bicycles.

I'm not the editor and I'm worried.

Still, if the column doesn't work out, there's always the novel and this blog. Who cares if they don't pay the rent?

To those of you who've sent me encouraging messages, many thanks. You've stopped me from feeling like I'm phoning a black hole when I blog.

What I'd really like to do is introduce you to the people in the second novel. They're sweet, funny, tragic, struggling for grace... And one of them is really hot, even without taking his shirt off.

Scotch that last comment. I'm a Serious Author and I have no interest in the body temperature of my characters.

Still, it'll take a while before the novel becomes more than a handful of notes and clamouring characters and, in the mean time, you may see me waving from the pages of The Straits Times.

If you do, come over and say hello.