Some people might have wondered where the book was up to. I had aimed to have a draft finished for the end of January and, well, it’s February now. Well, the book grew, as they so often do. I had a target, and I passed that target with a week of January still to go. It’s still getting bigger, and still ‘nearly done’. It’s one of those things; you cannot accurately predict how long a book will be when you start writing it. Sometimes bits grow here, shrink there, but mostly grow. That’s what I find anyway.

So I’m going to go back over the first 20,000 words and make sure they are finished. I’ll give these to Zoë as she promised to cast her eagle editorial eye over them. That way I’ll have material to send to the agent, and I’ll keep writing in the meantime. The way I look at it, he’ll probably take anywhere up to six or eight weeks to get back to me, which is more than long enough to finish off the rest, pass it to Zoë, and have it tweaked.

The current recession is a weird thing. That is, it’s affecting the ‘day’ job quite mercilously. It does not mean I’m necessarily earning any less. Just that the notice I’m getting on the work I get is now pretty minimal. Generally, the phone rings and a little voice asks: “There’s a job at ‘x’, how quickly can you be there?”. This isn’t very conducive to planning your life around work. This means last week when spending four days with apointments in the evening for wedding related stuff, I lost three days’ work, because the shifts clashed with the apointments. That’s very iritating. More work has come in though, so I shan’t starve, but I could have done with that £400 squids, thank-you-very-much. Still, at least I’m still working. My poor brother-in-law has been made redundant, Zoë cannot find another ‘day’ job, and my Father is struggling a little too. In fact, it’s getting hard to find people who aren’t struggling at all.