Eye-eye!

Actually, it should be 'eye' in the singular. Long story short, I got a torn retina in my right eye, spent hours at first my local hospital, then an eye hospital in central London, then had my torn bit lasered by a doctor who was using the wrong machine because he had left his own glasses at home! After three or four nerve-racking attempts, he asked the consultant for help.Mr Consultant, very grumpy at being snatched away from his private patients, mended my eye with the correct laser machine, then swept out before I could ask all the questions that were on my mind, such as, would the various attempts with the wrong machine have caused any damage to my eye?

I can barely see out of it at the moment. Everything is blurred, covered in what looks like a black sandstorm, and I can't work or read as the eye I am now relying on is my 'bad' eye. It's the good eye that developed the tear. Apparently, it's more likely to happen in people aged 60-70 with severe short-sight and green or blue eyes. I tick all the boxes.

Luckily, a friend assured me that when he suffered the same thing, it was two or three weeks before his vision began to improve. Cross your fingers for me and I'll carry on crossing my eyes!

Creature comforts

I think you could say that Charlie, the stray ginger mog, has settled in.

Book news

My agent emailed to tell me that the publisher who is still hanging onto Perfect Lives is considering starting a new list with ten books, one of which will be mine. The decision will be made any day now. Ooh, the suspense!

Meanwhile, I have another publisher interested in reissuing the revamped version of my first ever novel, a sexy romp called Sweet Temptation which I wrote under the pen-name of Caroline Standish, as an e-book. No advance but a good royalty. I've mentioned another idea of mine, too and she's asked for sample chapters so I need to get scribbling.

I am also polishing up a synopsis for my agent. She represents children's books only, which is why I am going it alone with the adult stuff. She likes the title and the general idea, so that's a good start.

Off to north London tomorrow to view some more flats. I don't have high hopes, as one looks a bit boring and the other a bit small, but... you never know, do you?

Hurt

Looking back over my posts, it seems that I whinge far too much. But I'm afraid I'm about to have another one. A BIG one. For I have been done over, robbed, mistreated, right royally shafted. I can't think of another way to put it.

It's all about the bloody house next door. When our neighbour told me not to rely on him buying it off me (which was the only reason I was buying it in the first place, to secure it for him until his money came through), I panicked at the thought of getting stuck with a house that needed tons of work and potentially having to sell at a price that wouldn't cover my buying costs. So I backed out and copped a fee of nearly £1000 from the solicitors for the work they had done so far.

I have spend the last week flat-sitting for a friend. Perfect peace and relaxation in N. London, a chance to lick my wounds and make new plans, confident I had made the right decision. But while my back was turned, machinations were afoot. The neighbour spoke to his bank and his solicitor and decided to put in a direct offer on the house for less than he would have had to pay me, as 'middleman', but more than I had offered for it. So I have lost a large amount of money, my feelings as well as my pocket are very hurt and I am furious with Mr G who, I feel, could have supported me; as he is pally with the neighbour, surely he could have found out his true intentions. Or maybe he knew them and wasn't going to tell me.

On the one hand, Mr G has been saying that the house purchase is 'none of his business', yet on the other, he has already told the neighbour that he may as well buy the searches I have already paid for, in order to speed up the buying process. I feel a lot has gone on behind my back and nobody has been on my side. That's what hurts. Mr G refuses to discuss it and I am left with a large hole in the wallet. It seems that the last sixteen years with Mr G haven't counted for very much and in reality, I am on my own and probably have been all along. Time to move on?

Missed houses. misty lenses

Apologies for not having posted much lately. There's been a lot going on, not all of it good. I backed out of the house next door and a For Sale sign has just gone up and I feel quite sad and wistful. I didn't back out on a whim. I was buying it to secure it for the guy next door, who was going to buy it off me next year when he got his money through. But ten days or so ago he collared me in the street and shocked me by saying, "I don't want you to rely on me."

Well, of course I was relying on him! I knew there was no point my buying it otherwise, as it needs heaps of modernisation and I don't have the cash. That put me in an awkward position and I didn't know what to do, so I mentioned it to a property renovator friend who toyed with the idea of lending me her builders to do it up in return for a split of the proceeds, until she did the sums and realised there wasn't enough profit in it to make it worth her while. So I would have been stuck with it. Mr G told me I wouldn't cover my costs if I sold it without improving it, so I backed out and the solicitor has slapped a bill for £900 on me, saying we were near completion. Then, to cap it all, Mr G has now started telling me I should have bought after all and spent £20,000 on a rear extension which would have been easier than rebuilding the illegal loft rooms. Why didn't he suggest that earlier? Too late now.

On Tuesday, I trekked into North London and saw a gorgeous flat. It had two bedrooms, a lovely garden and... oh joy... a bedroom with nobody above it. The agent said I had to make an offer there and then or risk losing it. I said I needed to sleep on it, as it didn't have much in the way of storage and I needed to think about it, and by the next morning he'd sold it to somebody else.

As well as all this, a friend has been diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy on Monday. I went over to see her today and apparently she had a severe reaction to one of the drugs and nearly died! Thank God she is recovering now. I hope she will be okay. She's certainly optimistic and determined enough.

There is a faint light of hope flickering on the publishing horizon. In my last post, I mentioned the latest hot genre, New Adult (what an appallingly unimaginative name). Well, the publishers are researching it and there is a possibility that my sexy book Perfect Lives, that was supposed to come out at Christmas and didn't, might be their first New Adult title. Please cross your fingers and toes for me...

Meanwhile, I have been buying lots of books for my Kindle. I have got into Judy Astley and have bought three of hers, plus three 99p books from an Amazon offer. I only read my Kindle when travelling. Yesterday, it made a half hour tube journey and a 50 minute bus ride pass so quickly that I almost missed my stops. I had been to the British Museum to see the Ice Age exhibition and found myself in tears of deep emotion. I felt connected to all the humans who have ever existed and in awe of the artistic impulse that lives in all of us. I wonder how the man or woman of 23,000 years ago who carved a reindeer's head on a piece of mammoth tusk would react to the sight of modern day people peering at it through the glass of an air-conditioned case whilst plugged into an iPod telling them all about it?

For a brief spark of a moment, I felt as if I were looking through a telescope at a fur-clad figure chiselling away with a sharp stone, his or her skin ruddy in the glow of a fire. For a microsecond, eyes connected across the millenia, deep-set brown with my own myopic hazel. Then the lens misted and I was back in 2013. Slightly regretfully.

New book genre

At last publishers have invented a slot between Young Adult and Adult fiction. It's called New Adult (nothing very imaginative there!) and here is a link to a very good article about it. I might just have a go...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/04/15/new-adult-genre-is-the-hottest-category-in-book-publishing/2022707/?

Cat nap

Flad is so old and stiff that he can't curl up into small ball the way he used to. So we decided to treat him to the biggest cat bed we could find. However, he doesn't quite seem to have got the hang of it, does he?