The Mighty Tome and mini successes

I finally finished the Tainted Tree edit, bar one or two short passages that need rewrites. In spite of that, I have started work on converting the whole file from Times Roman, double spaced to our usual font and single spaced; I’ve also adjusted the margins to book size. To my dismay, it is still about 380 pages long, about 40 pages longer than I’d previously imagined. I still have work to do; I’m going to disable Widows and Orphans where necessary. (Oh, the cruel things we writers have to do.) This might lose me a few pages, but it’s still going to end up with high printing costs.

Our Goldenford meeting was last night and went well. We were entertained by a description of someone’s trip to an erotic art exhibition, and it was downhill all the way, from then on. Despite all, our books are progressing and the copies of Thorn in the Flesh, Anne’s book have arrived, together with spares of the other books. So there’ll be no panic prior to the launch in February.

In the meantime, I was pleased to see that my short story for the Writers’ News competition, No Smoke without Fire, was shortlisted, and they printed a letter of mine, about my successful self-publishing of The Fruit of the Tree too. The short story was one I'd written for one WN competition, missed the boat, considered it for a second one - Anonymous Letter, I think - and finally got it off to this one by the skin of my teeth, thinking that the chance of there being another competition for which it was suitable was remote. Now I'll consider whether I can enter it for something else.
However, next week, I’ll have to concentrate on invoices and bookkeeping. It’s VAT time again and, much as I hate to admit it, bookkeeping is more valuable to our family than book writing – or publishing, if it comes to that. It’s also necessary to chase up some money and ditto above – I am more valuable with my accounts hat on, than with my writing fingers on the keyboard.