Some work of noble note may yet be done

It’s Friday.

I am supposed to be explaining the odd events of the past two posts. From Violence and Alcohol? What violence, and what alcohol?
Considering that I don’t drink and am a wuss.

(By the way, don’t test me on the wuss thing. I may just be being modest.)

It is a long and laborious story, about destiny, and courage, and adversity, and flagging courage, and doubts and, finally, our hero saying, “Destiny schmestiny, I want money.”

But I need to make it short, so here is the short version. I have retired my first novel, Violence and Alcohol.

Initially titled Run, but when I found that I could not incorporate the song into the book, I changed it.

Several years ago I developed the idea that I had the capacity to produce a decent work of literary fiction and I set about writing Run. During the half a decade or so that followed everything else took second place to this. Run was a good reason not to return those calls.

The result wasn’t half bad, if I say so myself. Nice things were said about it.

Until we tried to publish it. Then the general opinion of publishers’ editors was, “Nice writing, but we don’t like the story.”

So I have retired the thing. Now I am looking ahead. I just got the newspaper's permission to compile my Sunday Column, Bad Idea, into a book. I guess that’s what I shall be giving my dear Mummy on Christmas instead of a story of loser debauchers who try to pick up girls in bars with stupid lines and then end up, at the end, articulating the crisis of the modern urban African youth and its parallels with the ongoing development of a third world country like Uganda.

But I can’t just shelve it. At least lemme let you guys take a look at bits.

And now, for this weekend, I shall be obsessing over what to do for the cover of the Bad Idea Book.