43,260 Words

I'm writing a book. It may turn out not to be a very good book, but I'm writing it anyway.

It all started when I was pregnant with my second child... no, actually it started when I was about eleven and I tried to write a romantic novel about a pretty young brunette named Poppy. I had just read Menfreya and I'm afraid to say it had affected me deeply. Anyway, this novel is crime fiction, but I'm hoping it's more literary than most - it's a sort of cross-over thing I'm after; not strictly genre, as they say in the Guardian Review.

I'd be doing a lot better if the baby would stop growing up and go back to those two- and three-hour naps I used to love! (I'm going to try and stop using so many exclamation marks; I do think they look tacky.) I'd also be doing better if I didn't have to spend five minutes every day waiting for fifty or so pornographic spam emails to load onto my computer, and then another five deleting them all off. I've tried unsubscribing (ironic, since I never subscribed in the first place) but to no avail. I need to investigate the spam settings on my email programme more thoroughly I think - another afternoon lost, with no advance on the word count.

Speak soon,
Love A