By The Sea is 55,000 words along, and I have come to a point where I have to go back and read the story so far, just to be quite sure I have it all in my head. You can read it in serial form on LabLit, though I am much further ahead, of course.

The book, thankfully, hasn’t deviated from my carefully drawn plan, but the characters are more interesting than I’d imagined. They are taking centre stage, wresting the text from the Gothic glooms into which I had been in danger of falling. Now the characters have internalized these glooms, which is more fun.

The villains have become more villainous, and also more sympathetic, which might be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you ask.

And there is also a lot more action. Sex. Violence. Violent sex. Blood – buckets of it. And I can promise more of all these things as I go on. As I wrote in an earlier post, almost all the writing happens on the daily 06:55 between Norwich and London, and I find that tapping out 1,000 words or so of blood, sex, violence, mutilation, dismemberment, incest (you won’t have read that part yet) and Gothic interiors quite sets me up for a day at the office.

A colleague has recently distracted me, however, with a horribly addictive application attached to Facebook, the social-networking-site-du-jour, which I am assured is like MySpace but for grownups. The application is called Bookshare and you can find more about it here.

Basically, you can build a library of your books, see what other people have in their libraries, and append reviews of what you see. I had been looking for just such an application for a while: I used to have a book reviews page on my own website but had taken it down, as I wanted my site to be a shop window for books I’d written, rather than a long ramble about my personal peccadilloes (peccadilli? peccadilloi?). Imagine the fun I’ve been having, then, porting over a hundred book reviews over to Bookshare. As I write this there are around 700 books posted, and the indomitable developers will soon have to insert some search capability, otherwise one won’t know where to start!

As for peccadilloes – well, much has been happening in the Gee menagerie. Our corn snake Cabbage died a few days ago – much wailing and gnashing of teeth. As newbies to reptile-keeping we are engaged in a somewhat fruitless postmortem, wondering what we can have done wrong. But Sidney, the other corn snake, is much livelier and more vigorous than Cabbage ever was, so my theory is that poor Cabbage was simply a Friday-Afternoon reptile, not fated to live long.

And now have a rabbit, Rebecca, who is entertaining my sister’s rabbit, Ebenezer Archibald, who is visiting us while my sister is on holiday. The hamster, Nippy, thrives, despite his friendship with our cat Fred (our other cat, Marmite, remains aloof).

And we’ve just bought an Eglu, a kind of high-tech chicken house popular with right-on Guardianistas keen to get back to Mother Earth and re-live The Good Life. If my wife can emulate Felicity Kendal, I’ve told her, then that’s all right with me, though putting the Eglu together when it arrived yesterday was something of a trial.

Now it sits in the garden (I almost typed ‘sits in The Guardian’) waiting for the arrival of chickens. We have yet to get in touch with local breeders, and are wondering which breeds to get. I grew up with Rhode Island Reds, but the Eglu people recommend things called Pepperpots or Ginger Nuts, of which I have never heard. Peking Bantams are a possibility. But given the social milieu in which we shall move as a consequence of this purchase, I think we should find a breed called the Buff Islington. You never know.

Reviewing this post, containing as it does references to sex and chickens, reminds me of a rather good joke. It goes like this …