not really finished...the moment of handing a manuscript in to the publisher is always weird. there's a mix of worry that they won't like it, huge relief at having finished it, doubt about how it could have been done better (one more draft?), and a niggling awareness that it's not really actually "done"; there is a lot more to do, little technical things and edit reviews and image permissions...until the book is in one's hand it's not done, and not even then because then one must - wants to - promote it so people actually read it. last night I saw my first book on the shelf of a bookshop and I was like, oh, there you are. Two years ago that was "done" too...

...writing a book does not of course leave a lot of time for blogging...but it is coming together pretty nicely.

Arcade's little books are not overlong. The manuscript is 30,000 words, including breakouts and quotes from all those funny 19thC documents and letters I've read along the way. Some are so delicious they are going in despite not being strictly necessary. And the quotes from journals by passengers aboard the ship Oxford took to Australia, though from different voyages, are priceless: all kinds of dramas, fights, deaths, vomiting and ways to combat months of seaborne boredom.

I have a self-imposed deadline of late next week to get the ms in...there will be small additions, like references, but if I don't do it by then, it will be February.

Right now I am exactly the age Oxford was when he was released from prison. I cannot imagine starting life with nothing now. The more I find out about how well he acquitted himself, the more I like him...and the more I cannot quite reconcile him with the utter fool he was at 18. Though of course many of us were utter fools at 18.