Two things:

1 – I need to write something for my blog.

2 – I’m getting very impatient about waiting for the rights to An Inspector Calls.

Is it so wrong of me to harangue the lovely people at Penguin for taking so long to give Firestone Books the rights?  Admittedly the people I’m contacting probably have such great towers of paperwork that holes will soon need to be cut into the ceiling to make space.  Their phones are probably shrieking like Banshees, and they’ve got emails coming out of their ears.  (The Penguin staff, not the Banshees.)

I’ve been emailing Penguin every few days, and they’ve gone from saying “it won’t be long” / “please, be patient” / “leave us alone” / “you’re in breach of your restraining order”, etc, to just not replying at all.

At the moment, as I write this, the Heinemann edition of An Inspector Calls, is at number 4 on the amazon.co.uk book chart so will be selling thousands of copies a day.  This is the peak period for educational book sales, and it looks like I’m going to miss out on this lucrative gravy train.  The gravy train has gone.  And has left me with only dry potatoes and turkey, and now I am sad :o(  I want gravy.  Not sure if I want it with onions, or just plain.

I’ve sent three emails to the Penguins in the last week and had no reply.  Do I just stop?  Or do I harass them until they do something?  This horrendously slow process has been crawling along for months; crawling like a snail; a sluggish snail.

So far I’ve sent approximately 35572966 emails to Penguin.  Will one more make a difference?  I’d told them that I wanted to get the books out before September.  Perhaps I should have specified the year as well. (“Oh, so you wanted to release the book in September this year?”)

I’ll keep my loyal readers – both of you – updated on this in future blogs.  Wish me luck.  (Good luck, I mean…)