So look, I know I missed my schedule with Death Of 1000 Cuts yesterday, and I also know you don’t really mind. Thanks for not minding, hypothetical blog-reading pal.

I am more or less done with the latest round of edits on my novel. I know I keep alternately restarting and finishing the editing process, and it might seem – externally – like I’m in denial and performing CPR on a resolutely unresponsive corpse, to which I retort:

1) don’t die on me, man – DON’T YOU DIE ON ME

b) actually it is more like grooming a lovely pony

The thing is, when I change story elements, I then need to show it to people who haven’t read the book yet, to get a reaction untainted by previous drafts, give them time to plough through the manuscripts, collect responses, decide which responses are shrewd and which are BS (often readers’ opinions are flatly contradictory and so I have to make the final call), then act on the new information. I suppose there’s a touch of the Sunk Cost Dilemma at play here, where the more you invest in something, the easier it is to rationalise investing even more in it, chasing a return on that original investment.

But the fact is, when I started out writing this novel, I hadn’t put pen to paper in over half a decade. I had to relearn writing fiction. And my initial attempts fucking sucked ass.

I’m so familiar with the story that it’s hard to step back and appreciate it, but I think – very slowly – I’m creating the coolest thing I’ve ever made. I think you’ll really dig it. I’ve written the novel I wanted to write, with all the things I wanted to see in a story. It’s not perfect, but it’s very much a story that could only have come from me.

Anyway, to celebrate my more-or-less completing yet another creative cycle (I’ll do a proofread next week just to check for any obvious continuity borkage) I wanted to share with you the 10-minute pilot episode of Bee and PuppyCat, a cartoon by Natasha Allegri. The series just got successfully Kickstartered and it looks like fun. I showed it to my wife and she confirmed that this is pretty much what the inside of her brain is like all the time.