The sigh of relief

I started writing the little book on style the last week in February in the grip of a delusion that it might only take me about three weeks; it is based on lectures I wrote (two a week) over the fall semester, and in another sense it's based on a lifetime of reading, so that I felt the hard part was already behind me.

In fact it took longer than three weeks, more like seven, but I have just sent the full manuscript to my agent: it is just under 40,000 words, about a hundred and fifty pages, with a grand total of 31 footnotes.

I really like this little book!

Now it is just a question of waiting to see what happens next, which is not really my forte, but I can get started in the meantime on the ABCs of the novel (formerly known as bread-and-butter of the novel) and also have some seriously grand triathlon training (I'm doing a half-ironman in May and - amazingly - my first full Ironman race in Wisconsin in September).

(It is so crazy, really I am on a mission to stop doing things so much as if under a compulsion, but I feel that by getting this little book done relatively early during my year of sabbatical I have bought myself a bit more breathing space than I usually have - it would be good, though, if I could write most of the other book this year too - I do not know why it should be so much so that I only feel OK when I am madly writing, planning, training, racing, but it is certainly strongly the case...)