This is always the most teeth-grindingly, nerve fraying end of writing. Publication. The eBook version begins processing today, and I’ve spent two days eyestrain formatting and triple checking a pocket paperback version of ‘A Falling of Angels’, the second in the Paul Calvin series. I found one typo and changed a grand total of eight sentences, very minor changes at that. Mainly tense and syntax. Alterations of meaning that only really matter in my mind. So this afternoon, sometime around 4pm Pacific Standard time 4th November 2014, I’m going to press. I think. A day earlier than schedule, but that all depends on your time zone, as it will already be the 5th of November in Australia.

After that I’m going to do some more reading for my citizenship interview on Thursday in Nanaimo. Angie and I don’t have to do the tests because we’re both over 54, but we’re studying for them nonetheless. Just in case someone changes their mind at the last minute. We’ve both worked long and hard for Canadian Residency and Citizenship; gone without, left comfortable social structures behind, spent a lot of emotion and money, but now we’re going to see if all our expenditure and effort has been worth the time. In that way it’s rather like writing a novel. Huge amounts of time spent working, writing, re-reading, studying and crowbarring information into recalcitrant neurons, all in the hope that someone else will like it enough to accept your work, and by the same token, you.

Seen from that viewpoint, immigration and novel writing both look like massive exercises in self validation. Like gambling. Win, it’s all smiles and massive whooshes of happy relief. Time for Champagne and celebration. Lose, and you simply have to pick yourself off the floor ready to try again. My paranoia has been on overdrive, trying to think of ways things might go wrong and then making sure they don’t. For a given value of certainty. I have so many contingency plans it is hard to remember them all.

It all comes down to the wire on Thursday. I’m so tense it’s hard to sleep properly.