Wasps or bees?

Not exactly a literary subject but something that bothers me for a few days now. Well, there is a weep hole just above the patio door (double-skin facade ventilation entry point). I like animals, don't take me wrong, but I don't like wasps as they are obnoxious little creatures and their stings are vicious. The pest control company asked me to take a picture to make sure they are not bees (of course, I don't want to get rid of bees!). Decide for yourself but they look like wasps to me. I took the picture late at night with flash switched on. That's the time when they're least active - I'm sure you'll understand why I waited up until midnight.

Anyway, summer in England still hasn't arrived and the forecast says more rain is on the way but next week we should finally see our bright star in the middle of the solar system and I want these wasps out of the way. In the mean time, I will be working on my daughter's drawings and have a final combing through my book before taking on beta reading (and proofreading) of my wife's baking book.

I met publisher for my professional book and she told me there were 274 books sold since April (71 in USA), which is really good for an academic book in such a narrow field and I haven't even started with proper marketing yet. Not bad, not bad and I hope the UK government picks it up as it actually provides a model for creating Building Information Modeling (BIM)-friendly business environment. It will take time but I am positive one day it will be recognized as a major milestone in construction management research.

30,000 words

I couldn't really do much for the past week or so. My day job is really interesting but terribly demanding and running a block module last week meant I couldn't even Tweet anything. Having said that, I made a really good progressed and exceeded 30,000 words a couple of days ago. Should be at 40,000 by the end of the week but let's see. The story is developing really well although you will eventually decide whether it is good enough. I'm adding new and new circumstances and problems and continue exposing my main character to ever increasing challenges. I'm happy with the way the story builds on past complications of some of the characters but I'm sure I'll edit it several times before sending it off to professional editors.

There is one more thing that occurred to me in the past few weeks. Being an academic is fun in its own right but the academic world itself is sinking into an eve growing abyss of self-fulfilling prophecies of immensely arrogant quasi-academics who believe they are right in every single activity  they get themselves involved in apart from the time when they resort to procrastination. Mind you, there is really, really very little room for proper science in all this so I have now finally decided that academia is not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. I much more prefer writing novels and running my own business where you know precisely what you should and shouldn't do. Furthermore, I can always use my own companies to do some proper and useful research as opposed to figuring out whether I am methodologically well positioned. God, what nonsense!

Anyway, I have found a couple of interesting professional editors so all is well on this front and my Chinese manufacturers are pretty damn good too. Ah yes, this is something I ought to write about in one my future blogs when I launch my new online store. OK, let's get back to writing!