There’s a particular clip from the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that I’ve always found strangely poignant and timeless. It’s also one I think is utterly stone-dead hilarious, and frankly, I’ve been awaiting the day I can share it with baited breath.

I’ve been away from this blog for longer than anticipated, though for once it’s not been quite so fruitless and empty. Shadow of the Prow is now edging agonisingly closer to 100,000 words, which is filling me with more annoyance than anything else. We’re a few Chapters into the final Act and it’s already vastly over wordcount than I’d hoped (Act II alone was almost 20,000 words longer than planned) and given I want to pitch this thing to agents, I’ll have to get the final product vastly down if I want even a thin chance at being taken on.

Legion That Was had a first draft of about 155k, which is moronically swollen even by self-published standards. Its final version clocked in a little south of 130k, which even if I’d spent longer querying before giving in to impatience, would never have been accepted by anyone.

Dark and difficult times lie ahead.

Shadow, on another note, is no longer called Shadow. That was another difficult but healthy decision made in the last couple of weeks. In the interests of having a simpler, and considerably easier to marketable title (and one that is in vogue with, more or less, every book that’s come out in this genre for the last 5 years or so), I’ve opted for a more prosaic choice.

I searched around on Goodreads and Amazon and it turns out Big H isn’t the protagonist or titular character of many books or series. And none whatsoever with the archaic spelling of his name. So I think this is the right choice.

Another trip around the sun. And now I have to go back and retag about a hundred blogposts.