July 11th – 565,139.

Yesterday the weather broke and it was a little cooler than it has been, which was good news from the point of view of my sleep cycle but not such good news from the point of view of the England cricket team, whose batting performance yesterday was nothing short of woeful. If it hadn’t been the fact the bowling attack, minus Stuart Broad, reduced Australia to 22-3 at one point, putting arguably the three most dangerous of the batsmen from down under back in the pavilion, it would have been a bad day’s cricket from an England supporter’s standpoint.

Hopefully today’s play will be much more in our favour, but at this rate you can’t expect the match to last beyond Friday!

I did manage to get a decent slug of writing done and I hit 3,685 words without pushing myself. In fact I’ve looked back over the last five weeks, since the day I took as a rest day for my wife’s birthday, and since then I’ve averaged over 3,500 words each day. If I kept that up for a year the target wouldn’t be a million, it would be a million and a quarter! Don’t think I’m going to try for that though, although at the rate story ideas are piling up, I’d have the material to do it. My big problem though is going to be research time. I have a really good concept for a historical based on the reign of Henry VII and the early Tudors, but I don’t want to poach onto Philippa Gregory territory – and certainly don’t want to be labelled as a Philippa Gregory wannabe. That story is good for three books at least. At the same time I have another great concept for a sci-fi story based on the Nuremberg Trials reset into the future, but that will take an enormous amount of research. Where am I going to find the time to do this? Let alone the 1930’s Canada and USA mores, morals and geography I’m currently looking at for another project.

With the writing, editing, cover and editing work, I don’t know where I’m going to find the time for the research. The contemporary stuff is easy by comparison - actually it’s not easy, it just doesn’t need the same amount of research.