I confess, instead of resting up to convalesce from this swiney illness that my body seems to have quite readily succumbed to, I’ve begun work on the new novel. It’s about devils and doppelgangers and violins, and because I’m unable to resist a pun, it’s been retitled ‘Double Stop’ (although Doppelgang, admittedly, was indeed an equally awful and applicable pun).

After spending the past eight months or so working on the YA, it’s absolutely, gloriously wonderful to be able to write paragraph long sentences again. Hooray! Yes, fear my overuse of dashes and semi-colons and sentences that run on so long that they would be good candidates for a marathon.

I have a few other writerly little bits and pieces I have to do, like the John Marsden Award judging, and a commissioned article for WQ magazine, which I’ll probably get to on Monday, but other than that, and some silly short story ideas, it’s long and ghastly sentences and utter disregard for plot all the way.

Oh, and I went to see China Mieville at the writers festival yesterday, and came away feeling very inarticulate and a bit of a dullard (not that these are new feelings, really). I managed to ask an extremely circumspect (although not intentionally) question that China politely (and thoroughly) responded to, and we had a bit of a chat at the book signing afterwards. Jono also managed to get told off by Sleepers publishing for bringing his laptop along to the talk and spending the whole time programming (which he also did during the entire Continuum convention). He wasn’t even pretending to live-twitter or something vaguely socially acceptable.

Gosh, it looks like I’m bingeing on parentheses right now, too.