Harlequin's journal

A short month. That's my excuse. There was only 28 days in it. How much novelising can one do in 28 days...?

Well, OK, there were pressing Real Life matters which meant I didn't progress so much this month. Plus, because I had written the Big Turning Point, I had a brief crisis about What Happens Next. Plus, you know... much Merlin slash.

Current word count: 42616. Not too bad. That's just over 4k words in a month in which I might not have managed anything at all. But - i just have to do this - since September I have written 42616 words of my pro novel, and 89533 words of Merlin slash... I leave you to decide what that says about me!

On the plus side, I did come up with a really compelling idea of what my next pro novel will be about. So that's good - leaving aside certain niceties such as actually getting published, I feel as if I have a future in writing this sort of thing. The movie of this next novel will of course star Colin Morgan in the leading role. (The movie of my Keats novel will star James McAvoy.)

Meanwhile... I have a couple of times mentioned my ideas about how life and death work - how we're all made up of matter and energy, which never ends or disappears but simply transforms into something else. Well, I have come across a delightfully succinct and poetic way of saying this. In his poem Adonais, an elegy for Keats, Shelley said: 'He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely.'

What he said!