It’s Saturday night, ‘Falstaff’ with Bryn Terfel is on Radio 3, a gigantic seafood lasagne is warming up in the oven and I finally have a bit of time to update this site.

The page on “The Venetian Masquerade” has been updated with the back cover blurb – now there may (or may not) be spoilers there, so it’s up to you if you want to read it or not! My publisher loved it (which was a relief) and I’m waiting on my editor’s comments.

“To Venice With Love” is now – at least on my part – pretty much put to bed and so I’ve added a page for it. It’s been an interesting and, I must admit, surprisingly difficult job revisiting a book I originally wrote nearly six years ago. I thought updating it would simply involved adding some new material. It turned out to be far more than that. There’s been a lot of rewriting, the whole saga has been brought up to date and it now has a proper narrative structure. I think it’s tighter, better and more professional (which, of course, it should be). Oh, and it’s also going to be a rather lovely large-format paperback. It’s been well worth the effort.

The soundtrack to all this has been Monteverdi for “Masquerade” and an awful lot of Italian progressive rock for “To Venice”. Italian prog has become a bit of an obsession in the last few months. I’ll try and write a bit more about that in the future…in the meantime Caroline and Mimi are putting up with it as well as can be expected.

So while I wait for my editor to get back to me on “Masquerade” I find myself without anything to write, for the first time in over six months. I should, I suppose, be working on a proper synopsis for Book 4 (working title…no, sorry, I’m not going to tell you that just yet) but I think I might just treat myself to a couple of days off instead. But only a couple.

And that lasagne, I think, is just about ready…