I’m supposed to be writing today. Honest. It’s amazing how many distractions you can find to keep yourself away from doing the thing you ought to be doing and want to be doing and need to be doing. I just thought I’d spend a couple of minutes first, making a couple of long-overdue tweaks to the blog …

That was hours ago.

At a glance it won’t look much different, but behind the scenes I’ve been shifting menus around and updating categories. I started this blog over a year ago, when I was a wannabe author with neither agent nor publisher, much less a novel out at the end of next month. I’ve written extensively about that process (now categorised under ‘Publishing & Promotion’), but I hadn’t really updated the architecture of the site to reflect and support what it’s become. So today’s digression into online housekeeping is a start. I’ve created easier ways to access the extracts I post here, of which there’ll be more over the next few weeks and months; you can either look up the category ‘Extracts’ in the sidebar, or click on ‘Writing’ in the menu bar and go to ‘Novels.’ Comments are moderated now, because I have had enough of the new versions of spambot weirdness that have managed to creep through the filter (this was what set me off this morning, come to think of it). I’ve also created a contact form for anyone who wants to get in touch outside of comments.

And now, there’s a novel that’s 20,000 words short of finished and due for submission in two months. Pressing ‘Publish,’ departing WordPress, unplugging the internet …