P-Day

You'll be pleased to hear that the P in this post is not for poo. Indeed I can fairly safely say we're done with poo for the foreseeable future (at least as far as this blog goes, one is never done with poo entirely), having finally sent off the precious pongy parcel in the pongy pooey post.

So no. The P in this post is not for poo. Rather, it is for print. For today is the day that my precious first book,volume one of my childhood memoir, is at long last sent off to the printers to be returned in due course as the fully publishable article, all being well. I think it goes all the way to China....

And a long row to hoe it has been getting to China and P-Day, I must say, with a final bump in the flow of that row coming just last week when the publishers decided on a dramatic last-minute shift in the cover design, from a picture of me dressed as a dancing stork - and why not! - to a picture of some random girl dressed as a random girl, indeed a random girl who looks almost nothing like me; she is European, that is about the only likeness.

Never mind. There's no use crying over spilt stork, and I am assured by the sales people involved that the dancing stork on the cover of the advance copies wasn't selling, as far as pre-orders went, and that a generic, pretty young girl, is more likely to sell than a less conventional girl dressed up as a stork with a balaclava and beak on her head, though why exactly they didn't say.

Indeed I don't think they really know what sells off the book-store shelf or why, and can only go on what has sold before, never mind the wildly varying contents of each book; apparently people do judge a book by its cover. But knowing my book as only a former dancing stork can, if book sales today are all about what sold yesterday, the dancing stork is doomed to go the way of the dodo.

Still, in the meantime I'm celebrating P-Day in style, hobbling around on crutches after a mysterious knee injury on Tuesday, looking, with my long skinny poles for legs, not unlike a stork, indeed. Revenge, that's called; revenge of the dancing stork.