The writing … the writing? Well, it’s like this (insert embarrassed cough here): after writing all that bravura stuff last time about the muse being upon me, girding up its loins and rushing hither and yon on its winged chariot, I have to say that in the past two weeks I have written all of 2,000 words. And 1,000 of these were on the train as I came into the office this morning.

Not that this last fortnight has been devoid of incident. Coinciding with the Easter Holidays, it was full of many pleasurable things. Having moved into a new house last November, and therefore having seen little more of my garden than a fog-bound puddle for several months, I could at last get out into the open air and take stock of what I’ve got.

So, armed with two authoritative sources (The Tree and Shrub Expert by Dr D.G. Hessayon, and my mother) I could identify nearly all the plants in my garden and start to plan some additions and judicious pruning.

I’ve also taken up woodwork in a building affectionately known as ‘Hagrid’s Hut’, and my wife has been so taken with the cupboard I knocked up to hide the electricity meter that she’s commissioned me to make a set of kitchen cabinets. Ah me, such poignant faith in my abilities as a craftsman.

She was so thrilled, in fact, that by way of encouragement and as an early birthday present, she bought me a membership of the National Trust, a body that manages England’s Historic Heritage, though I doubt whether our own Period Residence (1930s council house) would qualify. After my father had seen the National Trust car-park sticker in the windshield of my eleven-year-old, 107,000-miles-on-the-clock Volvo, he declared that I was now officially an Old Fart.

And we’ve been taking advantage of that new-fangled global warming by going to the beach a lot. As we live about a mile from the beach, a distance that shrinks by entire micrometers every day, this seems like a more sensible thing to do than shut myself in my office in a minimally adapted cupboard under the stairs (did I mention Harry Potter?) and tap away on the next epic.

It’s not that the Gee family is entirely devoid of literature. My daughter (aged 9) is in the middle of a riveting mini-epic called The Wonder Book which, despite its colour and innovative use of vocabulary, owes more than a little to the aforementioned Mr Potter. She, too, has had trouble getting down to work, though, what with the manifest distractions on offer.

I never had this problem when I wrote The Sigil but perhaps that’s because I lived in a more boring place than I do now. What one needs as a writer is discipline—mine, it seems, is the train. My journey to work is well over three hours each way, and I can usually reckon on drafting 1000 words on the way to work, and 500 on the way home (the latter is more difficult as one is writing uphill).

However, I do have some news to report. Jennifer Rohn has kindly agreed to serialize my ongoing novel on LabLit. Well, it worked for Dickens…