Here I am with Downtown once again open in front of me. I’m doing a bit of slashing and hacking due to various kind suggestions. Well, when I say ‘a bit’, I’m looking at more of a massacre scale than a bop on the head.

I’ve found, much to my pained chagrin, that the best way to go about doing this is to delete entire chapters (never fear, they’re preserved in other documents) and rewrite from scratch. Otherwise I get caught up in my beautiful words.

As a result, I now have a magician and a magic show in my first chapter, and my main character is now fully aware of her solipsistic capabilities. This, of course, has a slight impact on, oh, the entire book, but hopefully will improve things. And magicians! Yay! And more doughnut references! How can that possibly be bad?

In other news, Melbourne’s weather is approaching something roughly in the realm of that of Hades. It’s 36 degrees C, currently (at 11am), and is expected to reach 44 (which is 111 degrees F, a trusty conversion page tells me). We have a sort of false autumn happening, as the trees are essentially dead, and are balding. It’s very odd to be skipping through piles of fallen leaves in February, I must say.