Benjamin's back, the cat's not

Split my time this morning between final proofreading for Coming Home to Me This Christmas and continuing the story of Slim Hardy in The Angler's Tale. One of the tweaks I made for Coming Home was changing Tesco's (as in the supermarket) to Tesco, which is apparently its proper name. I've always called it Tesco's, and perhaps the proofreader has as well, but I thought I'd fix it as sometimes readers pick up on the strangest of things (had a reviewer complain once about my use of "cookies" instead of "biscuits", which apparently pulled her out of the story).

The Angler's Tale continues to move forward well. It's over 50,000 words now and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. At the moment I'm estimating it to run to about 65,000 words, but we'll see.

And this morning I got my file for Benjamin Forrest and the Curse of the Miscreants back from the proofreader. Very excited. And she said the parts that I thought sucked didn't actually suck, so that's even better. Very happy, looking forward to getting this out soon. Thinking about mid-December at the moment, because I already have a release next month, plus I have a 1-3 Benjamin Forrest boxed set to come before then, which I need to finish messing about with and get out. It's going to be quite a busy few weeks, and I'm already excited about starting the next book, as the Benjamin Forrest world of Endinfinium is one of my favorites for sure.

I've been quite the churner this year. This year's releases look like this so far:

The Games Keeper (Feb)
The Dark Master of Dogs (April)
Slow Train (May)
We'll have a Wonderful Christmas (Sept)
Coming Home to Me this Christmas (coming Nov 15th)

plus there was a Crow 1-5 boxed set in June, I think. Not bad for a part timer, and to think people spend years sitting on a single book. Just get it out there and write the next.

On a downer, I filed my taxes in the UK for the 2018-19 tax year a couple of nights ago, and when you offset the income to the costs of ads and production it makes for depressing reading. I made money, woo! But hardly any. I could do a couple of extra private lessons per week and probably make the same amount with a fraction of the effort. Still, got to play the game, got to be in it to win it.

On another downer, in the outside world, one of my cats has now been missing for two weeks. The one in question, Kiki, is a bit of a roamer, living mostly outside in the shed (he has a nice igloo-like box and I put floor warmers in it in winter, but he's scared of my daughter so doesn't come in the house much), but he's now been gone for the longest I can remember. He's vanished for a week here and there, but never this long. The last time I saw him he was full of beans, so who knows what happened. We don't live near any major roads, but he likes a fight from time to time. On the plus side, there are lots of old people who put cat food out in my area, so he might have gravitated somewhere else for a bit. I'm holding off building his winter bed for a while, to see if he comes back or not.

My other cat, Miffy (in the picture below), however, seems delighted at his disappearance, and celebrated yesterday by catching a mouse, bringing it into the living room and then scoffing it in front of me. To make me feel better, she then came and licked my face.

Lovely.
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