Since I’m now really got the bit between my teeth with the writing, and am typing out a blog post each morning as a warm-up exercise, I’ll just make the headings here as above: day and date.

I woke this morning at about 5.00, which is an occurrence all too common as I slip through the last months towards the age of 50. After a cup of tea, I realised I was not going to get back to sleep and decided at about 5.45 it was time to get up. This is all good for some of those fans reading this, because it means I’ll have done a few hundred words before your alarm clock goes off. There’ll be others of course who are up and about too, on their way to work, or working, or contemplating the journey home after a night shift.

Caroline said she was damned if she was getting up before the sun, since it brought back too many memories of the time when she had to do that. I too remember those winter days when driving to work at 7.30 on a soggy, cold and dark morning to operate a milling machine for eight, nine or ten hours, then driving home in the dark afterwards, stinking of coolant oil. I remember months passing when the only daylight I saw was a grey and insipid thing for a half hour lunch break (I worked a half hour of overtime during my break so didn’t have an hour free) or through a narrow greasy window on the side of the factory.

It’s because of memories like this that you get a book every year. It’s because of twenty-five years of doing ‘proper jobs’ that I thoroughly appreciate the position I am in now. And it is also the reason I get annoyed when I hear about writers delivering their typescripts late, maybe years late, or if I hear the effete whingeing about ‘writers block’ or, in one case, a lengthy moan posing the question: ‘Why do we do this? Why do we put ourselves through so much suffering for our art?’. I started writing because I loved it, I continued writing without recompense for twenty years because I loved it, and I write now because I love it and because I’m well aware of what the alternatives are.

Last week I emailed the edited version of The Departure back to Macmillan and, just ten or so minutes after that, Julie Crisp replied telling me she was already printing the thing up. Next the copy editor will be giving it a going over, I’ll see it once or twice more, and the Macmillan millstones will grind, Jon Sullivan will doubtless do something brilliant, then copies of the book will drop steaming off the presses. August, maybe.

Now I’m back on Zero Point. On beginning to read through what I’d already written, I felt uncomfortable with particular events in it and excised them, tightening up the plotting. I’m still reading through and know that there’s a particular section later on I may well remove. It strikes me as gratuitously violent for its own sake and turns what I think is a particularly well-considered villain into a bit of a parody. Now we all know that I’m not particularly averse to a bit of gratuitous violence, but there’s plenty of that in the book already, and definitely more to come.

The book is at 65,000 words, an extra 1,500 word section recently added to fill in a plot hole even before I reach the end of this read-through. I’m currently wondering about time, distances, radio delays, slingshots, planetary orbits and relativity, and wish I had an Alastair Reynolds on tap. As it is, when I’ve easy access to the Internet, I’ll have to do some of that stuff which in interviews I’ve constantly denied doing: research. Made-up solar systems are easy, but a hell of a lot is already known about our one and I could easily write something that’ll have the anoraks emailing me in protest.