Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Don’t panic. I have a towel you can borrow. I have finished my first pass through the manuscript fixing as I go, and to be honest, not even doubling the original tally is a win. I finished a bunch of the original 43 again this weekend, and added a few more notes and placeholders. I have two weekends to hit target, and I can’t lie, it isn’t going to be easy.

But and however, I think I have either fixed some significant issues or identified how to sort them out with economy. i.e. I’m going to chop the problem, (one is so pretty! Hey ho.) and leave the functional text behind. I still have rearrangements and additions to do, as harmoniously as possible, but I have a good feeling about them because there are obvious points at which to make the additions I want. Apart from one. I may have to go digging, or create the spot required. It happens.

So in general there may be a lot to do, but I think I can make it, and have a finished work that is cohesive, to me at least. At core there are probably 10 main things to sort out, and fixing them will have a domino effect on a number of my other notes, allowing whole bunches to be deleted/completed in one fell swoop. Short controlled bursts of progress, baby! If the perfect is the enemy of the good, this will be good enough. For me, anyway. What it means to others is, as ever, a surprise waiting to happen!

It’s funny, this is the shortest book I’ve written, and I have the least qualms about cutting text. Got to think that’s a positive development. I have also noticed some of my verbal tics, and have corrected a few, but for others I just decided to leave them in. Partially because they make the next sentence sing a little better, and partially because I like the idea of a little idiosyncrasy leaking through before our AI overlords intervene and homogenize everything. Then they will add in their own digital idiosyncrasies, all the better to fool the humans. Sorry, consumers of content. But like me Murphy’s…

Have fun out there, and keep writing! (Unless you’re on strike of course… but then just write some stuff of your own for fun!)