Close to the end! I spent a little over two days on the read aloud edit. That’s a demanding task both physically and mentally, but it’s the only way to detect certain mistakes and find those passages that fail to read well. Correcting the errors I found has taken another couple of days. The MS now stands at 83,117 words, which is 3,554 fewer than last week’s total and a whopping reduction of 14,411 on the total words prior to the start of editing. They say you must murder your darlings, and I appear to have carried out a massacre! All that’s left now is the formatting before I send it off to my publisher. My deadline’s the end of the month, so I should meet that.

I spent a couple of days in the garden as well, starting a project that needed days of rain before I could tackle it. I managed most of that but it’s been raining again this weekend and I’ll need to spend some time tomorrow hopefully finishing off that part of the project. It’ll be a useful spiritual and mental break from the intense work on the book and will allow me to return to it fresh.

To those of you who write, I wish you well with your projects and hope they’re going well. To all my readers, I expect to have this book available for you before Xmas.