All is well, despite the silence. I’ve been putting all my energy into winning a short story contest. With a £25,000 prize and a star-studded judging panel, I’m expecting the competition to be fierce. To win, I think I’ll have to write something better than anything I’ve written before.

The deadline is next Monday at 5pm, and at this rate I’ll be taking a taxi across London and hand-delivering it at 4:59. But I will finish, and I will enter the contest. Winning or not winning is out of my hands, of course, but I have promised myself that I will at least enter, and I will take the time to produce a story I am truly proud of.

I’ve also been trying to make a lot of progress on my next novel before taking a long Christmas break. So in other words, I am in a ‘manic phase’. Blog posts (and also email, for those of you who’ve emailed me) have had to be sacrificed for now, along with many other things. It’s not a very sensible way to live, but it’s only for a while. I’ll write more when I next come up for air.