Number crunching

The Love Problem reaches 64,500 words (ie, roughly two-thirds distance) and I announce the figure as an encouraging mantra. Here comes another clunker. TLP is being written in MSW 2010, full to the gunwales with new if unlikely features, including the fact that Total Editing Time spent on the MS amounts to 23,149 minutes or 385.82 hours or 16 solid days. So now you know.

Chapter 10 exceeds 10,000 words and covers a single love affair set in Tucson, Arizona. I am now back in SW France and re-adjusting is quite difficult. One interesting discovery is that a real-life affair of the heart is not recyclable; for reasons unfathomable it all has to be made up. Perhaps just as well. Jana fascinates me but I don’t adore her as I did Clare in Gorgon Times. However, the emotional volcano which justifies the title has yet to erupt and will occupy the remaining pages. Perhaps I shall erupt then too.

POTTERY The huge new en suite wash basin whose taps Zach cannot reach was publicised two or three months ago. When I use it I am not at my most observant so it came as a surprise to find it has a model name: Utopia. This discovery brings the whole rickety process of shaving to a halt, as I reflect on the how and the why. Underwhelming ambition, surely. Nowhere near my strangest name for a porcelain artefact: an ancient WC in the Lake District called The Pike.

QUITE HUMANE Confirmation of a book ordered on HHB’s recommendation arrives by email: Your Amazon order has dispatched… Transitive instead intransitive or the other way round, I’ve given up punditry for Lent. Unless the meaning refers to what goes on in abbatoirs.