It’s been a slightly disrupted week in the writing den and is set to become more so. We had the decorators in yesterday as the ceilings in our two work rooms needed painting. They are about ten feet high, so I wasn’t going to be doing that myself. It only took a few hours and the chaps did a great job, but it did mean complete disruption, moving furniture out, taking away everything except the bookcase, covering the desks… you know the drill. A couple of hours shifting stuff on either side of the actual work added to the delay, but I did manage to edit one and a half chapters I’d written the day before.

That’s what I usually do. I write a chapter or part of one each day, usually between 2,500 and 4,000 words depending on time, and the next day, I run through it, tidy it up, remind myself where I was, and then plough on with the next one.

The disruption will continue as we have scheduled power cuts for maintenance between 7.30 and 16.00 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week. For the sake of sharing a topical photohere is the announcement on social media of our power outages.

They may not affect us all that time, but I must be prepared. I can write for four hours on my laptop battery, but after that, I’m in the dark, as it were. We’re also in for force eight or nine winds on Thursday which could get noisy, but the weather is otherwise still amazingly mild for January in the Southern Aegean. We’re up to 16 degrees during the day, and down to twelve at night.

Still, the next book is coming along. At the last count, I was at 140,000 words with around another 20,000 to do. After that, there will be a lot of editing (my favourite part), but I am still on track to finish the Larkspur Series by the end of March.

Hopefully, I will be able to get a blog up on Saturday before we get plunged into darkness; if not, look out for a delayed weekend post on Sunday.