exciting stuff II

Current work: Medical
Listening to: Take That
Reading: next on TBR

The book after the one I’m writing now is my Venice book, aka my glass book. Now, I was being a bit naughty on Friday – remember, it was a bad crow day and I’d convinced myself I’d lost it completely. (This was before my ed emailed me to say #40 was accepted.)

On crow days, I have two choices: potter about and be miserable about the fact that I’ve done absolutely nothing, or switch to a nonfic project until the crows shut up. The latter suits me better because it makes me feel productive. So I was working on my new project, which sort of involves the churches in Norwich – including St Peter Hungate. The church is used nowadays as a medieval art interpretation centre, so there are displays of stained glass.

When I started planning the Venice book, I had plans to visit St Peter’s and talk to the stained glass restorers – until I decided to make the book a duo and wrote the fairground book first. But school holidays start next week, which means I get to take the kids to lots of different places. I nipped on to their website to check the opening times and discovered that they’re running courses for adults on stained glass for beginners in the middle of August.

Given that my next heroine is a stained glass restorer and I’m going to start said book in August, this means hands-on experience, which will be VERY useful for the book. It will also be useful for my church book (which I think is about to be resurrected – has been on hold since Feb. Sadly, in the current economic climate, a contract does not necessarily mean a definite publication date). And it will be useful for the new project, which is what made me look at the website in the first place.

I make that a triple whammy. Given that, and the fact that I have a thing about glass anyway and the course will let me make a panel I can take home... Quick phone call to DH to check the date was OK for him: yes. And I was in luck because they still had places.

I’m so excited about this: it's something I've wanted to do for years and years and years. (Can't draw a straight line with a ruler, but who cares?) As I need to pay for it beforehand, this means visiting the museum during the first week of the summer hols. And while we’re there…

I am so lucky that my kids enjoy museums.

Plan for today: work like mad in morning, and visit Dad this afternoon. I had planned to take him his favourite coconut cakes from M&S, but they were out of stock; I bought him some English cherries to tide him over, and hopefully Sainsbury's will have something naughty that he'll enjoy too.