Time now for a break from my current obsession with The Amazon’s Girdle. Almost all the reviews I’ve seen are five star, which is wonderful, and I am so grateful to everyone who posted on amazon’s website, or on Goodreads. Thank you, thank you.

But I feel worn out!

This publishing game is better played by the young, I think (though this thought may be only temporary). There is little point in publishing a book if no one knows it exists, so publicity appears to be as important as the writing was in the first place. I can’t say I am happy about that, but so it is. Apparently these days, even if you are published by one of the few Big Publishers, you are expected to initiate your own publicity – unless you are one of their chosen top five. Random House didn’t tell me that when they published Stop Dreaming, Start Living (a self-help book that really works), which explains why it never became a best-seller. It gets starry reviews, remains in print, and I even receive fan letters now, eleven years since it first appeared in 2004. But I did little to promote it then, and things have got steadily more difficult. These days you need to be a whizz on social media.

I realize I am not good at social media, because I don’t really understand how they work.  No doubt, this is because they came IN around the time I applied for my pension and bowed OUT of the workaday world. I understood publicity, because I had done lots of it as a working woman (for other people, of course), but this was the old-fashioned kind – press releases, newspapers, magazines, occasionally radio. What else was there? But now…

Now it seems I have to start learning the trade all over again, and I’m not so sure I want to. I am painfully aware of the indisputable fact that the time available to me now is growing shorter. So I want to write all those novels clamouring to get out of my head while I still can, not spend precious hours of an ever shortening time trying to tell people how wonderful I am. Who cares? Only my family and friends, and they don’t need me to tell them stuff on a website. We talk!

You are writing this, you may object. And it is true that I enjoy blogging from time to time, finding something to say that seems important to me and may interest or entertain others. I like writing about books I have been reading. And I rather enjoy have a moan about the travails of an Old Dog in a Brave New World. So this is a piece of self-indulgence – as well as a whimper of despair.

I am taking time off to reflect.