Update

Have stopped work this afternoon just short of the long final scene, which needs significant revamping (it's not just that I'm moving it from Central Park to Morningside Park, but it's all going to go quite differently this time round).  So: one more editing session with pen and paper, and then I have a messy marked-up pile of manuscript that needs to be transferred to the computer.  I will do one further very thorough going-through, with some bits and pieces of new writing still to be interpolated here and there and hope to send a new version of the novel to my editor before the end of the month.

School starts next week, which is a mixed blessing (really in January I am often in low spirits and ready by now for the distraction of classroom time); I've got one big other work thing due at the end of next week, so I think that I'm going to have to put this aside for some days and organize myself for the beginning of classes before coming back to the novel revision.  However I should be able to make my way to the end first and force myself to undertake the slightly horrible job of typing it all up between now and Tuesday: that's the idea, anyway.

(NB The Young Unicorns stands up pretty well to rereading, and it is interesting for me to see now what I would not have noticed as a child, the fact of its being published in 1968 and written specifically in the shadow of the social transformations of the late 1960s; but A Severed Wasp is dreadful in ways I would not at all have been able to understand when I first read it at age twelve or thirteen, though I still find it grippingly readable in its embarrassing fashion!  Very interesting and appealing, of course, to read two novels set in the neighborhood I've lived in for more than ten years now.)