End-of-week update

Have still been editing frenetically all week, but have just sent what I hope is near-final (it would be rash to say final) novel version to my editor.  I wrote an ending that I am really happy with, it happened yesterday, it felt amazing! 

Up since 6:30 for marathon last editing session and have had very little sleep this week, but need to refocus now and write one other thing I promised to get out today.  Possible/probable good news related to style book, but it will be a couple months before I know anything for certain, so I will wait to give details at a later stage.  I have been working too hard...

Read a stunningly good book over last couple days, Tana French's Broken Harbor.  I think it's her best yet.  (Sorry to see I don't have the others on my Kindle, as I am now extremely keen to reread them all - will have to stop by the library...)  I am probably on the record elsewhere on the topic of how much I dislike Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, but imagine all the genuinely chilling aspects of that haunted-house story (perhaps Kelly Link's amazing "Stone Animals" is a better comparison) in a realistically rendered psychological thriller about the fallout of the financial crisis in Ireland.  IT IS AMAZINGLY GOOD.

Ghosts

From George Gamow, My World Line: An Informal Autobiography (1970):

During my stay in Göttingen I made friends with a jolly Austrian-born physicist, Fritz Houtermans. He had recently completed his Ph.D. in experimental physics but was always quite enthusiastic about theoretical problems. When I told him about my work on the theory of alpha decay, he insisted that it must be done with higher precision and in more detail. Being a native Viennese, he could work only in a café, and I will always remember him sitting with a slide rule at a table covered with papers and a dozen or so empty coffee cups. (During that period, when one asked for more coffee in Germany, the waiter always brought a new cup, leaving the empty ones on th table to be counted in making up the bill.) We also tried to use the old electric (not electronic, of course) computer in the university’s Mathematical Institute, but it always went haywire after midnight. We ascribed this interference to the ghost of Karl Friedrich Gauss arriving to inspect his old place.