I have absolutely no idea how time whizzes by so fast; it’s quite dizzying, but I suppose I have been quite busy since opening the door of novel-land and looking outwards, letting the light gradually eke in and, symbolically speaking (because, in reality, there is always more facebook to check, more articles to read, more emails emails emails to reply to), closing the laptop (on my novel) for the final-ish time before creeping gingerly out of the room.

I have done put the thing I am most deeply and urgently passionate/worried/excited about into the smallest part of my mind, and closed a tiny door on it, at least for the time being, while it is out there being read/considered by literary agencies. It’s not that I don’t think about it; ha! But in a sense it’s none of my business what other people’s reactions to it are; my job is just to wait and trust it falls into the right hands while doing something else entirely, I suppose. Good job I’m good rubbish OK-ish at being patient.

So, what to entertain you with in the meantime?

In the absence of certainty, here’s a photo of a rainbow I snapped on my phone in between this sentence and the last, which seems fitting:

In other news, I have recently been:

• Lying naked on rocks in Germany’s Schwarzwald. For work.
• Clearing out boxes and boxes of stuff from the top floor of the house, amusing myself (and distracting myself from the boredom of which) with the pretence that this is akin to clearing out my mind. Oh, and doing my tax return. Clearly my capacity for dullsville is hardy.
• Being utterly, utterly uninterested in the international excitement of a windows upgrade, while having 99% of my technological/electrical devices systematically break on me.
• Prancing around on the south coast of England, posing as a ‘sea gypsy’, a Bond girl, and a Victorian. ‘Prancing’, by the way, is a technical term.
• Meeting the brand new human produced by two of my lovely friends. She is aptly named ‘Beau’; a trailblazer, clearly, simply by being female
• Making lip stains using beetroot (for the colour) and other hocus pocus
• Making sad-but-right decisions about hilarious and hot but potentially incompatible men
• Booking frivolous October flights to and from an upside-down place and semi-resisting the urge to make them into a work trip (instead I will mainly read, meet people, see stuff and eat coconuts). There is an international ‘writer’s festival’ happening there during my trip, which I took as as an encouraging sign that I wasn’t going completely off-course (assuming there IS a course, which I suspect, usually, there is). I am badly overdue the geographical whiplash of an adventure.
• Being hooked on Humans; seriously, though, where is the line between human consciousness and synthetic consciousness?

And, also – not in parentheses – here’s a quick blurb about my book:

After a heaven-made wager borne of bravado and romantic vision, not-quite-an-angel Reign Beau must take a break from painting sky murals and find the earth’s seven rarest, least noticed colours, reporting on what he finds across the globe, before it’s too late. Whether he succeeds or fails, the world will never be the same again. Meanwhile, one human girl who hears music as colours is a cause for distraction from his mission, but she has made an absurd vow regarding another mysterious, troubled man, threatening a love triangle of universal proportions.

Reign Beau and The After Man is an expansive, offbeat tale about humanity’s place in the universe, spanning mathematics, homelessness, the internet, quantum theory, philosophy, myths and love.