DONE BUT NOT FINISHED: The Book has just been sent to The Publisher - all 210,000 words, plus bibliography. I learned long ago that a book is never finished until I actually hold the final product in my hands. As I've said before, I'm very grateful to the University of St. Andrews and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for their support.

I don't doubt that The Series Editor and The Reader(s) will have Suggestions For Improvement in due course (and I don't even want to think about the indexing), but for now I'm immensely relieved to set it aside and think about other things. My holiday break starts this evening, with an agenda that includes putting up shelves with my wife, playing with my son, reading fiction, and generally not working on The Book. As for the fiction, I'm rereading Stephen R. Donaldson's First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, since I recently bought his latest: The Runes of the Earth, the seventh book in the series, with three more projected. And Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, the final volume of his Baroque Cycle, is in the queue as well.

Oh yes, and there's blogging of course. One of my goals during the break is to update the long neglected links page, so if you've found any dead links, please drop me a note.