BLOGOFFEE-MORNING-DAY - ALL WELCOME

Welcome to my humble blogabode for coffee, chocolate, cake, shoes, and anything else that will help your day flow. This is now an official part of the Biggest Coffee Morning in the World, organised by and for Macmillan Cancer Support. you may well find the normal seriousness of this blog has come adrift. I've had a hard day. ["Today" being yesterday, technically].

By the way, apparently it was National Punctuation Day "today". I'd like to register my contribution to a subsidiary, [National Bracket Day]. [I find I'm using them more and more]. 

In honour of Blogoffing, I have just baked my own patent and trademarked [literally] "Brain Cake TM." If you would like the recipe, please go here. [Oh bugger  -  I just looked at that recipe again and realised that I forgot the linseeds. I've made it hundreds of time but I was making curry at the same time so things were not simple. Oh well, if you make it, don't forget the linseeds. They're the bit that especially make your brain work. In fact, if I'd had some first, I wouldn't have forgotten them ...] It is the only cake in the world which no one can make you feel guilty for eating. Research shows [my research] that eating two pieces makes your brain work twice as well as eating one piece. I admit that this rule cannot be continued indefinitely and that there will theoretically come a point at which one more piece will make your brain work less well than one fewer piece.

In the pic, you can also see Harvey Nicks coffee, but don't be decieved  -  it's just a tin; and you can see something in the background for later, much later.

Anyway, we haven't got all day.

What are we doing today?
Not doing the usual thing, which is listening to me pretending to be crabbit while revealing the mysteries of how to persuade publishers that your book is really what they have been looking for all their lives.

No, today we are having a blogoffee day. And this is what happens. And I warn you, it is not well organised or throught through. I'm having a difficult week and juggling too many things and not enough linseeds.

Choose one or more of these activities

Writers and book-loving bloggers  -  tell us about your blog or website. Give us a short (because brevity is a very important skill in a writer, and one that I have spectacularly not mastered) description of / plug for the blog/website, and its address. Ideally, give the address as a live link but if that is beyond you, no problem.

Anyone  -  and/or tell us about someone else's blog, ideally not one that someone else has just mentioned. Educate us, enlighten us. We'd like to know about booky or writery blogs, please.


Readers  -  what do you look for in a book? We're writers and we write for you, so tell us what you love and what you hate. As long as you don't hate anything I've done.

Everyone  -  THEN, because this is about sharing, read everyone's comments and promise to visit at least three of the other links that you've never visited before, or not recently, and leave comments there.If you're here early in the day you won't find so much choice, so COME BACK.

Twitterers  -  twitter away all day. Tell the world about interesting bloggers you met today. Retweet and tweeteme and all that stuff.

And finally  -  join a collaborative story.

Collaborative story RULES:

• It's entirely optional, of course.
• The starting sentence is below. Read the comments to see what others have added and then add one sentence.
• When I say ONE, I'm not actually being literal. I don't want a story with loads of really long sentences. So, if you do a lovely brief sentence, you can have TWO. If you do really really short sentences, you can have THREE. The integrity and flow of the story is paramount. You're an artist, not a show-off. Yes?
  
• You can take the story in any direction you like EXCEPT explicitly erotic (sorry!) or completely boringly stupid. Absurd, in the literary sense, is fine. But it must flow from the previous sentence and not illogically contradict what has gone before. I don't mind if it becomes absurd, gothic, amusing, tragic. I just want to see good writing and I want to be interested, gripped or entertained. What it does to the rest of you, I don't really care. This is my party and I can be entertained if I want to.
  
• Story contributions should start with the word STORY in caps, just so we don't think you're recommending some bizarre blog
  
• NB NB NB Story contributions should be in a separate comment from your other contributions
• Because there's a danger of cross-posting (where two people follow the same sentence simultaneously) it's going to be chaos  -  who cares? We can deal with chaos.
• copyright issues  -  I got quite tangled in the abstract possibilitieis of this so I have decided that this is the situation: we each have copyright on our own contributions, of course; however, if anyone would like to quote any part of the story other than his/her own (you know, because the story is going to be so incredibly amazing ...), anyone may, though not for financial reward, on condition that the extract is always credited as "a collaborative exercise on helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com where individual authors can be found". If you can actually credit a person's name for your extract, please do. I am not responsible for any plagiarism or theft of ideas  -  this is a game and by entering you indicate that you are relaxed. You can't sue me and anyway, I don't have any money. Any doubts, please ask.
  
• please do not defame or offend any living person; obviously do not offend the taste of decent people  -  I am a decent person and prefer the f-word and similar not to be used on my clean and tidy blog; each writer takes responsibility for the legality etc of his/her own words.
• basically [do you sense my panic?] I do not take any responsibility at all for what comes out of this. You're all grown-ups. More or less.
  

I'm regretting this already but your starting sentence is:

"Taking a deep breath and giving the wood-burning stove a quick anticipatory prod, Marilynne Wainwright, literary agent par excellence, opened the refreshingly clean and professional-looking package and pulled out the double-spaced, single-sided, A4 sheets within, sighing with relief and surprise as nothing untoward fell out: no extras, no photos, no sticky toffee gifts."

Where does Macmillan Cancer Support come into it? Well, if you've had fun, learnt anything or feel for any other reason inspired to recognise the wonderful work that Macmillan do, then do consider making a donation directly to them by clicking here. It's entirely up to you.

Now, I'm off to start the comments going. [Which is impossible until I've posted this, so if you are visiting in the first few monutes, you'll find no comments and you can picture me frantically trying to come up with something while drinking first coffee of many]. Don't let me be alone  -  that would be really embarrassing.