A book has gone to bed.

It’s been a crazy season – of eleventh-hour renovations and far-flung family and 18 people and three dogs under one sweltering roof for the craziest Christmas ever … and in the midst of it all, copyediting and layout and proofreading and all the associated insanity that goes with sending a book (or two) to press. The endless quest for less looking and staring and gazing and all of that. The growing realisation that a proofread completed in the midst of all of the above is not the thorough proofread a book needs. The last-minute panic of trying to change things I should have changed earlier – much earlier – approximately 5 minutes before (after?) we should have gone to press.

I may have broken my editor.

But the book has gone to bed. And it’s beautiful. Its title is Surface Tension and it’s my longest work to date (and therefore has much more scope for looking, gazing, nodding and staring, much to my chagrin).

There will be more posts soon, but for now, the book has gone to bed and it’s as beautiful as it can be at this point, which is quite, I think, and that is more than enough.

And now I may go and have a lie down myself.