That’s it: I’m done. A shade under 70,000 words and must say I’m rather pleased with the results. Of course what anybody else thinks is moot.

The next day or so is scheduled for day job and picking through for errors. Still finding the odd typo and sentence needing a swift dusting, but overall it’s not bad for such a quick piece of work. Slightly under fifty thousand coherent words in two weeks. Wow.

Looking back, I might have done it quicker had I not been dealing with the day job and all the sundry discombobulations of the day to day. On the other hand maybe not. On the final section I had over four thousand words done by one in the afternoon after starting at quarter to seven. Nothing spectacular, just solid, head down keypad pounding. Everything was mapped out in my head, and all I had to do was pour it out. Today is final edit and format re the submission guidelines.

Tomorrow I’ll log on to the Harper Vector link and fire it off. If nothing comes back at me I will be a bit teed off for having put in so much effort but what’s the worst thing they can do, apart from say no? For myself I’m going to back up, put the keyboard into a locked box for a week and go fishing with a hip flask of whiskey in my back pocket. Do some heavy duty thinking about where the second in the series is going to take off from. Whatever happens, Paul Calvin is going to move on.