Despite my deep aversion to ticking clocks a la Captain Hook, I now have a Napoleonic hat style antique clock atop a bookshelf. It doesn’t go – all the mechanism is in a bag inside the clock – but it looks the part. What part? Ahhh. There is a clock in the library of Scarlet’s house, a strange clock becoming stranger all the time, and time is what I’ve secured myself in which to wrangle Book 2 into hopefully publishable material. Of course that’s going to involve cutting about a third of the manuscript but it’s that third which will be saved for Book the Third where I think the clock will really come into its own… along with all those other timey motifs I spotted along the way.

I just have to open the manuscript before many more minutes tick past…

No excuse for delaying now that I have the clock…