Okay, it wasn’t Nessie. It was an emu.
Let me explain.
I went to Inverness this weekend with my mate Mark to visit his old choir friend Pamela and her partner Neil. It’s no big surprise when friends of friends strike you as people you’d be happy to be friends with, too. Still, it’s always nice when it happens, and this weekend was a great example of it. Much fun! I took a few pictures, which are posted here (I don’t make an appearance):
I like going to touristy things here with native Scots. This weekend’s plans fell together spontaneously — the best kind of plans — and one of our stops was at the Loch Ness Monster information centre. It’s well-presented, and by the time you’ve gone through it, you’d be an idiot to still believe that there’s any possibility of a plesiosaur living in that lake. Of course, they finish with the words “But you be the judge”, then you exit into the gift shop, where you’re welcome buy as much Nessie paraphernalia as you can carry. The presentation is a bit like having a Richard Dawkins centre in the middle of Vatican City.
One of our other stops (before the de rigeur trip to the Black Isle Brewery) was to a petting zoo. Of course, it was my idea, and of course I got to see some goats. They had lots of other animals there, like deer, meercats, raccoons, bunnies, llamas, wallabies, birds of all sorts, and”¦ emus.
Vicious attack emus!
Neil bought us bags of generic animal feed (beige pellets, raisin-ish lumps, and corn flake bits), which, strangely, everything in the place liked to eat (except the wallabies, who were very standoffish).
I wasn’t sure how to feed the emus — their heads rose up and down just like the marionette one I had as a child, but they featured all-too-real dinosaurish beaks. I didn’t want one of those anywhere near my hand. So I moved my hand this way and that, trying to figure out how to hold it, but then one of the giant birds thrust its head forward, right into the paper bag of feed and through the other side, where it bit my finger. I’m told the whole bag went up into the air and I caught it again before it spilled. That was reflexes, ’cause I was focused on the fact that I’d just been nipped by something that looked like it should be extinct.
Still, the weekend was a braw Highland fling, as Mark and I called the road trip. Now I’m back home, into my work, which this evening involves setting out my next steps for the book.
I’ve had some really sweet comments from people lately who’ve said they got something from the self-publishing experiences I’ve shared here and elsewhere, so I’ve decided to show my homework as I learn and try new things with this book.
Step One: I just filled out an application form for a string of ten ISBN numbers and dropped it in the postbox! In the UK, this is where to get your ISBNs — the product catalogue numbers which allow retailers to find and order books.
I like the idea of having nine other books to write.
<
p>
