Igenlode Wordsmith

Pitch problems

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:00:50 GMT

All the material available on the Internet emphasises the importance of addressing your 'book pitch' to a individual named literary agent; "no Dear Sir/Madams please, they go in the bin", one agent says adamantly.

But the actual agencies I'm looking at have a single submissions@agency address for all the agents working there -- the first one I emailed gave specific instructions to put the name of the person you were trying to contact in the title of the email, but the current one doesn't say anything of the sort (on the contrary, it says "If you would like *us* to consider your manuscript, please send *us* the following"). So while I do have an individual agent in mind, I'm not at all clear that I'm supposed to be the one picking and choosing in advance, as opposed to them deciding who, if anybody, might have any interest in my project... which means I either give offence by presuming to say whom I am and am not prepared to deal with, or by failing as a result to address a specific partner by name :-(
(And to be honest, all the people in the London office, apart from the one specialising in Japanese literature, sound like a possible potential fit anyway, even though I was only given the one name as "actively seeking to expand their client list"...)

In the (geeky) circles I move in, you don't normally put "Dear So and So" at the top of an email message in any case, any more than you put the date or your street address -- but I don't have any experience of business emails :-(

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Russification

Sun, 31 May 2026 01:38:33 GMT

I am amused by observing the process of Russification of gamer slang in Project Zomboid: having adopted English terms the language proceeds to add all the relevant suffixes etc to them as if they were ancient Slavonic monosyllabic roots, until you end up with something that is almost totally divorced from any Englishness at all and nicely assimilated into the language :-D

So to 'loot', for example, takes on a verb ending to become the Russian verb лутать, and then acquires a corresponding perfective verb form полутать so that it can form a future tense, and you end up with reflexive expressions like полутаемся немножко -- "Let's go and do some looting" -- in which the original basic syllable 'loot' has become almost entirely buried in Russian accretions!

Even more assimilated is the verb to 'check', which has been adopted as чекать and then apparently acquired a thoroughly Russian irregular perfective form, чекнуть, presumably by analogy with such verb pairs as прыгать/прыгнуть...

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Repotting

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:12:18 GMT

( Splitting up nasturtiums and marigolds )

( Towel-tomatoes )

The Gypsophila elegans has just opened its first spray of little white flowers( Read more... )

The chive pot is now very much dominated by self-sown flax, plus a self-sown Linaria (both in flower, so I am reluctant to pull them out). And, ironically, there is *also* something that looks to me rather like a seedling yellow Cambrian poppy that has established itself in the chive tub while I wasn't looking -- after all the years and years when I tried and failed to get a single one of the hundreds and hundreds of yellow poppy seeds to germinate, or even to successfully transplant the parent plant out of the miniature rose pot! Well, we shall have to see what it turns into...

I likewise have a strong suspicion that I have what is an extremely miniature sweetbriar seedling underneath one of the elderly pot marigold plants ( Read more... )

I also separated the two chillies, though it turned out that they hadn't really developed enough root yet to be entangled; it will make life easier later on in any case. For the record, they are currently two inches high and nice bushy (but very small!) little plants.

Discovered today that every single one of the four chillies, dozen or so basil seedlings, and unknown number of marigolds that I had donated for sale had been eaten by slugs :-(
One likes to imagine donated plants going to good homes elsewhere, but of course the probability is that a lot of them simply die in the hands of inexpert recipients: 100% mortality is a bit depressing, though. Especially as almost all of the basil that I kept for myself also died.

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Flower photos

Sat, 30 May 2026 13:29:34 GMT

I watered everything at 8am this morning, and the marigolds and rudbeckias were already starting to wilt (still need repotting) by the time I went out to take these photos when I got home at 1pm...

As always, click through for full-size photos:
( Read more... )

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Potting on

Fri, 29 May 2026 20:10:47 GMT

( Spring onions, basil and pak choi )

( Tomatoes, peas and strawberries )

We now have Gypsophila vaccaria, pink Linaria, cornflowers, Mesembryanthemums and flax in full bloom, along with the field and oriental poppies, and the white flowers from the 'purple mix' -- oddly enough none of the cornflowers in that mix seem to have come out the dark red colour this time round. None of the California poppies have produced white flowers this year, even though I didn't think any of the old plants had died, so I'm not sure what happened there...
( Sweet peas )
The two chillies that I kept from the pot of six are still tiny, but have put on considerable growth. I have sowed some more basil seed, from the 2025 bag this time :-)

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The die is cast

Tue, 26 May 2026 08:18:28 GMT

Well, I've done it; I've sent off my first 'query'. After a last-minute panic over exactly what people mean when they say 'the first 25 pages'; it turns out that they mean 'the first 25 pages when formatted as an A4 page in Microsoft Word in Times New Roman with one-inch margins', and as I don't have Microsoft Word or Times New Roman on my system and my manuscript is formatted to paperback book size and margins so that I could print and bind it for my own sample copy, that means that the 25 pages I had carefully exported and reformatted to be email-safe, one chapter at a time, were actually a considerably shorter extract than expected :-(
(If they gave a word count for their sample passage it would make life much easier.)( Read more... )

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Hot

Mon, 25 May 2026 22:58:24 GMT

It's midnight, and the temperature indoors is still 82F with all the windows (including the French windows) open and a through draught :-(
I'm literally walking around in vest and pants because it's too hot to wear anything else. The shirt I was wearing together is filthy and ripped under both arms; I have just been scrubbing my socks with soap where the colour from the shoe-leather has stained them apparently permanently after a day of sweating into them. They have settled down to a sort of grey with blue splotches.

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Flowers and heat

Mon, 25 May 2026 21:22:14 GMT

What a horrible day. So much for Bank 'Holiday'; I spent almost all of it in assorted forms of hard manual labour in conditions of searing heat, with respite in the form of a 12-mile cycle ride in the middle, which was at least reasonably breezy.( Read more... )

The flax is coming into flower in all the assorted places in which it self-sowed, and we have the first opium poppies (one red, one purple) to join the sea of California poppies and red field poppies that have been coming briefly into flower all over the place. Apparently the orange long-headed poppy did throw up another flower bud, but I missed it (probably it flowered and died in the heat of Saturday); it now has two seed-heads. Some white flowers have appeared in the "purple assortment", though the short blue/purple ones that were blooming there earlier on seem to have finished. I never did get round to finding out what they were! The coloured cornflowers have buds on but haven't opened yet, but the first of the pink Linaria has.

The purple spike of toadflax has been in flower for a while, as has the first of the rose campion. We also have a pink mesembryanthemum growing in what was once a strawberry pot; the strawberry plant is clearly dead, but the mesembryanthemum is looking very vigorous, even though there is only one of it. I did try scattering some more mesembryanthemum seed under the largest of the towel-tomatoes when I potted it up, but I had to top up the soil level in the pot subsequently, so any seedlings will have been buried :-(

I picked and ate my first two strawberries, but they weren't really ripe yet (although red), so it was a bit of a waste.

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Pitch procrastination

Mon, 25 May 2026 09:18:21 GMT

I finally have a completed 'pitch' for Arctic Raoul, and continue to procrastinate about actually sending it off.
(I didn't want to send it in the small hours when it was completed, because that would look needy. Yesterday was a Sunday. Today turns out to be a Bank Holiday, so anything I email now will probably end up in a bigger heap of unsolicited messages than usual...)

This is for someone who was initially listed back in January as a 'new agent actively seeking clients', which was what prompted me into a renewed spasm of activity on this manuscript -- well, I think I've pretty thoroughly missed that window of opportunity! But he *does* sound too perfectly suited to give up on( Read more... )

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Plant progress

Sat, 23 May 2026 18:56:35 GMT

All but three of my dozen basil seedlings -- two in one tub and one in the other -- have now died, and only one of those is putting on decent-sized adult leaves (ironically I appear to have a self-sown basil seedling in the midst of the spring onions -- which are doing well -- that is looking much more vigorous!) I didn't *want* a dozen basil plants all of the same age, but the incredibly high mortality rate definitely makes me more than ever suspicious of the compost, even though these plants didn't 'damp off' at the base but just went brown all over...

Went and bought a new bag of compost (and lugged it over my shoulder all the way up the long and winding staircase, which is one reason why I don't buy compost until I have to!)
( Sweet peas )
Picked the first two pods off the dwarf peas, and promptly ate them raw :-)

I managed to split up two pots of Swan River daisies and prick out the new rocket seedlings from their undrained tray, and then ran out of steam. The pak choi seedlings badly need potting up. The seed labelled "love-in-a-mist" has now germinated, as has the Limanthes, but the former doesn't look at all feathery, so I wonder if I had mislabelled the seedheads!

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Syrup

Wed, 20 May 2026 21:53:47 GMT

The elderflower jam was a pretty much complete failure. You are supposed to boil it cautiously for five minutes until it 'thickens': http://www.jam-making.com/jam_elderflower.html
I boiled mine with increasing alarm for forty minutes until I had to go out, returning several hours later (which meant I had to sterilise the jars all over *again*) to boil it furiously for another twenty minutes of frustration, at which point it did finally start to wrinkle when pushed on a chilled saucer, so I thought I'd better pot it up in order to avoid a repeat of the crab-apple boiled sweet episode. However the half-full jar even when stone cold is still not set; it has thickened into a caramel-coloured gloopy liquid but is nowhere near being jelly. So what I basically have is four sealed jars of what amounts to runny and very expensive golden syrup; I can only conclude that my attempts at extracting the pectin from the lemon pips were entirely ineffectual, and that the amount of pectin in the jam sugar (over 1000g out of the 1,300g in total) was insufficient to set that volume of liquid, so that it only started to thicken at all after a significant quantity had been boiled off...

The same thing happened to my mother once with a batch of bramble jelly that simply failed to 'gel', but that was at least strongly blackberry-flavoured and we were able to use it as a topping for yoghurt etc. This is pretty much home-made golden syrup with a slight surviving floral tang -- but probably too liquid to even function as a golden syrup replacement in baking.

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Cordial

Tue, 19 May 2026 22:30:34 GMT

I made the elderflower cordial with blood oranges, since that happens to be the (expensive) speciality of the season which the greengrocer has been selling me, and as a result it came out the most astonishing pink colour after the slices of orange had been steeping with the elderflowers for 36 hours :-)

In fact it bears a strong visual resemblance to the rose and elderflower cordial, albeit without the hint of rose flavour. ( Sweetness )

( Excess elderflowers )

I also need to make some sweet orange marmalade to use up the steeped citrus slices, which proved a very successful tactic last year...

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Elderflower

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:52:37 GMT

Wearing short socks to pick elderflowers is a tactical error, since the base of the tree is *always* surrounded by nettles... ( Read more... )
I am not quite sure how I managed to get my wrists and the back of one hand stung as well, but I definitely earned my booty :-p

This is the one recipe where I actually get to use the big 2lb weight, since sugar is very heavy for its volume. I need to dissolve two pounds of sugar in three pints of boiling water and then let it cool down overnight before starting the next stage of the cordial tomorrow...

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Local elections

Fri, 15 May 2026 18:22:40 GMT

Election results from the local paper: leader of the Conservative group loses his seat, Reform get no councillors at all, Labour have a slightly increased overall majority. Pre-election leafletting from the Liberal Democrats with the usual faked/misleading graphs: "A Labour vote is a wasted vote! Don't let the right wing in! Only the Liberal Democrats can win here!" This is why I don't vote Liberal Democrat... if I still had a vote, which thanks to the Conservatives I don't.

The two Independent councillors were returned with a sizeable majority (60% of all votes), as was the single Independent member of the neighbouring council, who received the highest number of votes of any candidate. In my view, *all* councillors should be independent councillors representing their own local wards, and not the victims/beneficiaries of whatever national politics happens to be going on.

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Coats

Fri, 15 May 2026 15:32:51 GMT

It just just dawned on me that the Russian indeclinable (and hence of foreign origin) noun пальто is of course the French paletot, taken straight out of the nineteenth century -- just as the French redingote is, reputedly, the English 'riding-coat'...!

Another of my tomato plants -- from the first batch this time -- has damped off while actually flowering; they are supposed to be way beyond it at this stage of maturity :-(( Read more... )

The first flower opened on the sweetbriar this morning, and there was a bumble-bee on it. (Sadly these wild roses aren't scented -- it's the leaves that carry the scent, but only when they are fresh and moist, and the leaves on mine are usually pretty leathery.)

At least one of the seedlings potted up as Gypsophila elegans has come into flower and turned out to be alyssum :-p

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Mortality

Thu, 14 May 2026 19:07:50 GMT

I potted up the *two* surviving towel-tomatoes sharing a pot from the second batch, namely the 'towel tomatoes (good)'. Every single one of the others appears to have collapsed and died, one after the other. [Edit: no, there is one more that I had put at the back.] The seedling chives have also died after their transplantation -- the hailstorms of the last two days probably didn't help -- and so have five of the six basil seedlings in one tray. The six in the other tray seem fine.
The second of the possible white California poppy seedlings has also now died, so that particular genetic experiment has failed for another year...

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Le comte de Monte-Cristo (ii)

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:38:06 GMT

I watched the second half of the new 'Monte Cristo' (or, to be more precise, Parts 3 and 4 being run as a double-bill), and ended up with the same verdict: sort of mildly interested, but not enough to actually recommend it with any great enthusiasm...( Read more... )

I really need to go and harvest some elderflowers; it is two weeks since I noticed that they were almost ripe enough, and I got the most terrific waft of scent (from some blossoms that were quite out of reach) while walking home tonight.

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Spam!

Tue, 12 May 2026 23:53:05 GMT

I got an actual comment on "Little Gentlemen", only to discover that it was from yet another spambot. https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hildajoe99/profile

Attempted to report it and got hit with a "please prove that you are not a robot, enable JavaScript to continue" unnavigable roadblock...

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"Before Dorothy", Hazel Gaynor

Sun, 10 May 2026 18:09:32 GMT

Unfortunately I'm not sure I can use Before Dorothy as a 'comp', because it managed to thoroughly get up my nose within the first few pages, in addition to being nothing like my story :-(

In many ways it reminded me a lot of fan-fic, which raises the spectre that perhaps this type of fan-fic is not, as I had supposed, merely incompetent, but is actively attempting to emulate this type of book... :-O ( Read more... )

The basic concept of the book is fine, and the plot, such as it is, is fine. (Not entirely sure about the Big Twist, but the author had to get some dramatic conflict out of somewhere.) The execution of those ideas is what kills it for me.

If I'd just pulled this book down off the shelf in the library out of curiosity without knowing anything about it, I would definitely have put it back almost immediately, since it doesn't meet the 'read a few random pages, care about the characters and want to know what happens next' test. As it was, I persevered through 384 pages of the stuff -- given that what I'd been reading previously was Rumer Godden, Jack London, and Barbara Hambly, the difference in prose quality was all too apparent. You know you've got a problem when you find yourself consciously having to force yourself to continue reading a novel instead of taking refuge in your Russian textbook!

It also immediately makes me want to start editing it...

( Rewrite )

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Tulips

Sun, 10 May 2026 17:39:57 GMT

The tulips have finally died down, more or less, and I can now attempt to lift and store them. As suspected, this involved uprooting practically everything else in the trough, including the garlic, a lot of field poppies on the point of flowering, a couple of self-sown marigolds, and what was either camomile or love-in-a-mist, as well as the usual chickweed and forget-me-nots. (Forget-me-nots are a pretty blue, but the flowers are pretty tiny compared with the size of the plant, and unlike the speedwell and ivy-leafed toadflax (also uprooted in the process while in full flower) the plants themselves have quite large and dominant rosettes of leaves that can easily take over a pot entirely.)

Where the foliage had died down entirely it was actually pretty hard to *find* the bulbs, given that they had been planted four inches deep and were in the middle of a mass of roots! Hence the general destruction... ( Read more... )

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Peas

Sun, 10 May 2026 09:44:30 GMT

Moved the last of the dwarf peas into its probably-final pot -- they are all flowering now. At least one of the sweet peas will need potting on further, but none of those are in bloom yet; I now have three pots of 'saved' and one of 'shop' sweet peas, which was not a deliberate ratio but may reflect the viability of the older seed :-O We shall see whether the first-generation offspring are worth keeping...

( Collapsed towel-tomato )

The two tiny chive seedlings were really not thriving in their (guaranteed sterile) coconut compost, so I have tried transplanting them into a small pot of general mix, where they may or may not survive -- they had almost no root. Ironically the original tuft of surviving chives has been thickening up quite nicely, although they are now dwarfed by self-seeded flax in that same pot! The pak choi/brassica has germinated, despite the age of the seed...

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The end of the furry hedgehog

Wed, 06 May 2026 09:49:03 GMT

The furry hedgehog wildife garden is clearly a complete failure; I don't really want to simply empty the compost back into the communal bags, since it is full of 'fairy grass' seed that may germinate in years to come, so I used the base tray to plant some more rocket. (Of course it has no drainage holes, so would be better used as a plant-saucer under one of the larger pots... however, this way the grass-seed has a chance to rot down further in a visible position.)

In the three little pots of candy-tuft, all of which are of the 'toy' size that is really too small to grow anything seriously, I sowed saved seed from love-in-a-mist, poached-egg plant, and the mutant pak choi from 2023 -- the latter mainly in order to get rid of the envelope! But it is some kind of brassica at any rate, and the seedlings can presumably be eaten.

( Corn-marigolds )

I potted up a dozen or so basil seedlings into a couple of tubs, but there are still rather a lot left...

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Splitting up

Tue, 05 May 2026 22:13:37 GMT

I finally got round to splitting up the various things that have been germinating in the dill pot, three or four of which were dill. I have been putting this off because, in addition to all my other normal reasons for putting things off, I couldn't be sure whether any of the winter purslane seeds might have germinated, or might yet be about to germinate; however, I now have several large plants that look as if they are more likely to be cornflower or flax, and some that are either Linaria, toadflax or alyssum, plus some that I already identified as chickweed or Oriental poppies and pulled out. I suspect the one that I had hoped was another mesembryanthemum is actually only the furry leaves of a forget-me-not, and I don't think I'm going to get any purslane out of that handful of seeds (which may or may not have ripened sufficiently in the first place). However, I have left the remaining soil in the tray just in case anything further germinates in it :-(

( Dwarf peas and towel-tomatoes )

( Orange poppy and not-a-strawberry )

Lesson 21 was another unexpected misfire from the Russian TV course, being basically an inferior reprise of the winter sport vocabulary in Lesson 18, only with worse acting and a lot less plot :-( I note that Lesson 18 is credited to the Kiev educational film studios and Lesson 21 to their Leningrad counterparts, so possibly the repetition was the result of someone carelessly assigning the same course material to two different production teams; at any rate the second team were evidently a good deal less creatively inspired by it than the first.

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Le comte de Monte-Cristo (2024)

Sun, 03 May 2026 17:30:20 GMT

The BBC decided to show a French "Count of Monte Cristo" on BBC4, so I thought I'd watch it as a change from watching Russian programming; ( Read more... )Since it was being shown as a serial in several parts, I had rather hoped that this was *not* the recent French film, of which I'd heard various mixed and on the whole less than approbatory reviews, but some earlier TV production, but according to the end-credits of the first instalment it was filmed in 2024 and is thus the new one after all.

On the basis of the parts that I've seen, I'd have to concur with the mixed reviews. This is *not* an immediate success; in fact the opening is one of the weakest parts, and might have turned me right off, but it does get better later on. ( Read more... )

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Tomatoes

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:12:27 GMT

( Towel-tomatoes )

The Roma tomatoes *finally* seem to have turned the corner and are starting to look more vigorous, and much to my surprise we have a chive seedling -- and possibly a second. And what may be a second and extremely delayed nasturtium; I had assumed that the seeds which had not germinated had simply rotted away by this point. (Zero signs of any of the non-germinated dwarf peas showing up as 'pea-shoots', and the two that were previously showing some sign of life in that pot are very small compared to the ones that were properly sprouted before going into the soil.)

I have sprinkled yet another batch of orange poppy little black dust seed across the soil, which must consist of a high proportion of dead poppy seed at this point! The single adult orange poppy plant is on the verge of opening its bud, and the yellow poppy has two flowers open and another one already over.

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