Rather like Doctor Who all is revealed

So within hours my second novel, the imaginatively named The Dog-walking Club, will be available to buy as an ebook from Amazon for the bargain price of $2.99. I bet you're counting down the minutes.

And now I can reveal the cover.

Speaking of Doctor Who I did enjoy yesterday's episode, the first with a female doctor. I think she will hold her ground and be very successful. One thing I especially enjoyed about the episode was the fact that I understood what was happening. It had all got very up itself over later years, the writers being too clever by half. Or thinking they were clever. Unless you were a nerd and could remember, for example, what happened in the fifth episode of the second season when Christopher Ecclestone was the doctor you didn't stand a chance.

I've written more about the process of self-publishing over on my not another wannabe writer blog if you're interested.

I have walked the Serengeti

I have my Serengeti badge!

Forgive me, I was never a girl guide so any kind of achievement rewarded by a badge gets me excited. And today FitBit told me I had walked the equivalent of the distance across the Serengeti, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

So how far is that I hear you ask. Five hundred miles. Yes, 500 miles. Which sounded mighty impressive until:
a) I looked up Serengeti on a map and saw how small it is on the grand scale of things; and
b) I realised it's taken me six months.

But it's still as good an excuse as any to re-post this video clip.

More Doctor Who than marmite

We watched the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special - and most excellent it was - on Saturday and at the end I said, 'I understood that. Apart from a tiny bit.' As I have failed to understand what's going on about 90% of the time during the last three doctors that was quite an achievement.

On Sunday morning I started thinking about it again and realised that, in fact, I understood very little of it.

Later, after our church meeting, one of the mums who'd been in crèche asked me what the speaker had been like. I paused and then said, 'So-so. I didn't like some of the stuff he said but every now and again he made a good point.'

Marmite uses the slogan 'you love it or hate it' in its advertising campaigns. Now I neither love nor hate it: I like a little bit spread thinly. And I was thinking much the same about the speaker: I didn't love or hate him.

Today I pondered more about it and posted three statuses on Facebook entitled Things that put me off, 1, 2 and 3.
1: when the speaker uses the words cosmic twice and cosmology once in the first three minutes of his talk.
2: when the speaker singles someone out and publicly prophesies over him especially when preceding it with the words 'I'm not prophesying over you.'
3: when the speaker says he's unhappy with his prayer life then says, 'it's probably a prayer life you'd envy but I'm not happy with it.'

As I couldn't remember a single good thing he'd said I came to the conclusion that while not hating him I can't have enjoyed his talk very much.

So it was less like Marmite and more like Doctor Who, in that thinking about it brought me to a different conclusion. 

If that makes sense then welcome to my world. 

Incidentally, in work today I was listening to the talk given by the speaker the week before. (It's part of my job to put talks on the website.) He was self-deprecating and excellent. Also didn't ramble or go on for ages. My sort of speaker.