Poem: Margaret Thatcher

In the week of Maragret Thatcher's funeral
I went to two other funerals
The first was Quaker Joesph's
And in the silence I heard
His friends and family praise and mourn him.
The second was for my childhood Auntie Gert
And I experienced real community warm humour and loss.
These were both quiet and dignified and private affairs
That celebrated the lives of two ordinary and remarkable people
Embedded in their own communities
Loved and missed
And given a truly royal send off.

Dilemma

OK so here's my dilemma. I have a good friend who is an award winning playwright and author who offered to read my Mystic Detective novel. She found it enjoyable and quirky but was not impressed by my plotting (neither am I!) and lack of real detective/police proceedures. She offered to help me work it up into something she felt would be publishable and possibly even a TV series.

The thing is with my experience of re-writing for academic publishing I hate re-writes and re-writes of re-writes and can you add this, reduce that etc. My passion shrivels up. Am I being too precious?

And the thing is I never meant Paul to be realistic. It was a bit of fun and I don't want him to be real. I love Raymond Chandler's detective Sam Spade but I don't think he is real and that detectives in LA in 1930 and 1940 were like that!

But I have dreamed of being a novelist and a poet all my life and instead I am forever being courted by academic publishers! But my pile of unpublished poems and novels gets higher and higher!

So dear friend what say you?