Update

I am working on an untitled novel which I started late in twenty-fifteen. I have a friend in America who is exceedingly successful with a series of crime novels which prompted me to try the genre. I started on 3 September, 2015, with a promising plot based on a crime that was somewhat unpleasant (although what crime can ever be deemed ‘pleasant’). However, as I worked I found I didn’t like where the story was going and so abandoned it. But I liked the characters I had created – they had become almost friends –  and so I made a fresh start; that was in December, 2015, more than a year ago.

I continued to work hard on this untitled novel but was never entirely happy with the plot and so put it aside for a while meaning to come back to it with a fresh look. Meanwhile I wrote and finished the short (34,000 words) and humorous crime novel called A Crook in The Café Arcadia (already referred to); I thought it was a lot of fun but it received universally poor reviews from my group of friendly readers and so I put it aside perhaps permanently never to be published.

By that time –  the end of July, 2016 – when I was ready to resume work on the untitled crime novel I was preoccupied with a whole semester of study of Te Reo at the Auckland University of Technology. And then when that was over I contracted pneumonia/Legionnaire disease from which I have only recently fully recovered but for a mild and lingering pain caused by pleurisy.

And so, only now, January, 2017, have I properly and seriously resumed work on my untitled crime novel which, when it is  finished, will be – I hope – a light, interesting and humorous read far from the nasty plot with which I started so long ago.

Meanwhile I am also working on a daily journal of minutiae which I hope to turn into something useful and interesting when 2017 comes to its end. Who know what will happen in the meantime.