Cracked it!

Yesterday I finished the youth theatre piece, one day ahead of schedule. A small miracle. I spent an hour or so in the evening looking through it and correcting the most obvious typos, and then gave up when the urge to start rewriting became too great. As soon as I've finished a first draft I can see, with great certainty, exactly what to do with it next, and I'm almost always wrong. Which is why it's a good idea not to touch it but put it away for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes. This morning I shall e-mail it off, send in the invoice, and pretend to forget about it for the next few weeks.
Tomorrow I'm doing an hour at the Lowdham Book Festival. I usually do this sort of stuff for writers' groups but I thought it might be a good idea to try the stuff out on a more general group. I shan't be alone as I'll have a couple of actors - Kevin and Sylvia - with me to read the extracts. I'm trying to tell myself that it isn't a shameless act of self promotion, but I know it is. I did it once before in a public library in North Carolina on an RSC residency with two actors from the company. The majority of the extracts are examples of bad writing and usually get a laugh but on this occasion we were greeted with baffled looks - my fault, I'd not explained it was supposed to be funny.
The contract from aurorametro for the script of We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea came in the post. They are publishing it early next year and then I shall have two books in print. I can't see how they make any money out of it, I certainly don't, but it is good to have a book on the shelf, it keeps you noticed and prolongs the life of the piece. They sent me a catalogue too, and it was already in there, and I got really excited. Hopefully, the retour with Eastern Angles will come through and the book can be launched alongside it. One of the best parts is googling the title and discovering that it's in the library of the University of Miami, or being sold second hand in a bookshop in Brooklyn. How did it get all the way out there on two print runs of 500? I'd like you to know that googling my one published book is not an obsession, and it's just by chance that I happen to know that at the moment, on the Amazon sales chart, it's rated 2,158,327th.