5,555

Is the figure portentous? I find it funny. After a week since I launched it into cyberspace my manuscript, Seasonal Variance, is ranked in 5,555th position on the Authonomy website. Holy Moses, is it so awful?

I should, of course, be chastened but find myself more bemused. Nor does it prevent me from devoting my days (in the most regrettable absence of paying work) to the new opus which goes by the certain-to-be-amended working title Necrocognition. In this instance my goal is a shorter text of about 50 to 60 thousand words and up to now I am managing about a thousand words a day.

In the old days I would have hesitated to set action in Beirut or in Edinburgh without having made a research trip. Beirut I visited once for just five days and my knowledge of Edinburgh is that of a schoolboy who left aged fifteen.

But with bloggers active on a daily basis in both cities, with search engines leading me to sites where I can confirm the WIki data, above all with Google Earth and geo-tagged Flickr sets I am thoroughy enjoying the digital travels which are informing the writing process. Great fun!

I hope that the 5,555 authors whose work is so much better than mine can say the same!


A video appended just for the heck of it. At risk of perpetuating the 'six degrees' meme, I was in the studio when the song was first recorded.