No one, absolutely no one who knows me, or has the slightest of passing acquaintance with me, is going to believe this.
I'm building a website.
(Waits several minutes while astonished Dead Guy followers pick up their jaws from the floor and gingerly re-attach them. Then picks up her own jaw and does likewise. No, I'm not sure I believe it either.)
Let's rewind a little, to indicate exactly how improbable this unlikely occurrence is. A few days ago my shiny fairly-new laptop threw a small wobbly (yes, OK, I know it was almost certainly something I did) and the useful little numerical keypad on the right of the keyboard hasn't worked properly since. The relevance of this is that a) I have no idea which combination of keys I hit in error to make it misbehave, and b) I have even less idea what to do to put it right. I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for online help. That's how technologically-minded I am. It's all I can do to punch in the number of the helpline on the phone's keypad, which fortunately works perfectly.
But despite this total absence of any proper relationship with technology, I'm building a website.
It's all because of Mystery Nights.
This is what we've rechristened the murder mystery evenings which Severn House inexplicably didn't want when they bought up all the other functioning parts of my small but perfectly formed publishing company last year. A couple of dozen of the events have taken place since I signed on the proverbial dotted line, the latest of them only a couple of weeks ago, so their popularity clearly isn't waning. And as I handed out information about them at a book festival last weekend and found myself apologizing for the absence of a web address, one of the 21st century's great truths hit me: if you don't have an online presence, you don't exist any more.
No doubt online presence these days means clever things like Twitter, which, cyber-philistine that I am, strikes me as an utterly pointless waste of time. I mean, who cares which minor celeb (who most normal people probably haven't even heard of anyway) is having breakfast? And multi-app'd smartphones, whatever they are; all I know is they make you available 24/7, which frankly I can't handle. And probably lot of other stuff which has passed me by completely.
A website is as 21st century as it gets for me - been there, done that, albeit using someone else's expertise - and since I seem to have a bit of time on my hands this week and my mother taught me that you shouldn't spend money if you have time to spend instead, I decided to go in search of a new adventure. (Mother also taught me not to speak to strange men, but if I'd followed that advice I'd never have had my publishing adventure, and think of all the fun I'd have missed...)
So far it has a domain name and a vestigial home page, so I'm not going public with the URL. I need to add a couple more pages with information about what actually happens at the murder mystery evenings, and how to go about booking one. Oh, and find a picture of an ornamental dagger. Clipart provided a hammer and an exercise weight, but no dagger. If you've ever been to one of our evenings, you'll understand.
If you haven't - well, watch this space, and all will be unveiled in due course.
If I haven't expired of shock in the meantime.