Folks,

Today we have been finishing the editing of Unseen Academicals.

It has been an immensely complex month with the Darwin Festival in Cambridge, the Oldie literary lunch, an honorary doctorate from Bradford; all of which has been exacerbated by a breakdown in one of our main machines.

Next week we go to see the National to discuss their upcoming adaptation of Nation.  It will be my first actual physical contact with them.

Now, what you have all been waiting for; we have just received the following from Mob films.  It pretty much speaks for itself and one can tell by some of the little details that they have become used to dealing with fans 🙂  This is their show and now that we have got to know them, we are leaving it to them to select whom so ever they consider most suitable.  We are not seeking nor do we expect any special choice in the matter and so please do not contact us in the hope that we can push you forward, because we can’t.

Quite a lot of our time has been spent experimenting with Dragon Dictate v10.  The trouble with speech-to-text software is that it’s at its best when it has a limited vocabulary.  The program is pretty ace at business and legal letters, but an author potentially uses just about everybody’s vocabularies and it doesn’t understand, for example, the difference between in and inn.  It would be handy if it could have a drop-down menu in cases like that.  It could also do with a more sensible interface.  Nevertheless, we are educating it as we go and it’s certainly an improvement on my typing now.  We did like the rendition of pioneer as ‘pie on ear’ and for some reason it will occasionally throw up a speech-to-text translation which no amount of forensic study will recognise as the original words said.  However, it’s helped me write a large chunk of I Shall Wear Midnight and quite a few episodes from a possible autobiography.

I shall see a few of the lucky ones on set very soon.

All the best.