Done done done

I finally finished work on the big book. I've spent almost every evening for the last three weeks indexing it, which involved going through 400 pages of proof with a highlighter at what felt like an agonisingly slow rate. It's a good job nobody told me beforehand how mind-numbingly tedious indexing a book is.

But it's done! After six years of research and revision, all the final typos and errors have been teased out, copyright permission obtained ($230 for the privilege of quoting a single Wallace Stevens poem on the first page!!) and index finished, and the whole thing passed on to my editor.

As I was finishing it this evening I cut my thumb opening a bottle of milk. I didn't have any plasters so I just waited for Mother Nature to do her congealing thing, but then instead I grabbed my indexing proof and scrawled

IT IS DONE

on the front page in my own blood. It seemed fitting. Outside I hear fireworks going off. They may be for Guy Fawkes Night, but I'm going to pretend they're for me instead.

It's over, it's all over

Gone now.

Apart from watching a snowman disintegrate, yesterday I drew a picture of St Boniface's first monastery at a place called Büraburg in Hesse. It's going to be in Boniface: The Book which is FINALLY finished, or at least it will be once I send all my pictures to the publishers.

I'm particularly proud of the wisps of smoke. The book now has an official cover and everything, which hopefully I'm allowed to put up here.

It won't be published until around autumn if all goes well, just in time for Christmas. Since I get a few free copies, I hope everyone knows what to expect in their stockings this year!

Noel and I went into Brum to see The Road yesterday. If the idea of watching two people stumble through the dead landscape of a nuclear winter with nothing on their iPods except Nick Cave instrumentals appeals to you, as it does to me, then you'll probably like it. Anyway, people who say it's depressing are stupid. It's ultimately much more uplifting than empty celluloid baubles like, say, Love Actually.