I've finished my new book! La la la, in your face cruel world, I have FINISHED a first draft of the new book!

And, to my own disbelief, I have even finished it in time for the deadline. This is truly remarkable.

I am also profoundly relieved that I will never again suffer from secondbookitis, because it nearly killed me. I've already started on a third book, and am feeling much better about the whole business. Boy do you learn a lot writing a second novel.

I shall have some thoughts about that in due course, but I wanted to ring the bells right now, at least. I got up early this morning, and wrote the final three thousand words still wearing my jammies. This is an advantage writing has over office work, of course, and I figure, if it's good enough for Balzac - who wrote in a dressing gown - it's good enough for me, when the occasion demands.

Look, Balzac. The great sculptor Rodin was commissioned to portray him, and when he turned in the sculpture - as happened more than once with Rodin's work - it was rejected as offensively irreverent towards its great subject. I think the commissioners had in mind something classical that represented the artistic principle. Rodin turned in a sculpture of a fat man in a dressing gown.

But it's a great sculpture of a fat man in a dressing gown. It doesn't represent the artistic principle, it is an artistic principle. Rodin rocks.

So, to retrieve my mind from whence it's wandered, I had a pyjama party with my book today, and I have now finished a first draft! Hooray!