Seasonal Variance now online

A certain satisfaction I derive from the fact that today is exactly four months to the day after the start of work on this manuscript. I have uploaded it to the Authonomy site which, notwithstanding all the reservations I have expressed, is at the moment undergoing a review of procedures which just might make the works submitted subject to ranking based on merit rather than social networking trickery.

This is a first draft. The action is set in 2011, which gives me plenty of time to update, edit and correct before some future effort to bring Seasonal Variance to a wider readership.

This time it is a true original, unlike Golden Dawn which was the novelization of a screenplay I'd had on the shelf for ages. 

I have borrowed the identity of a fictitious African country from the television series The West Wing and, in the event that the producers do not see this as an acceptable homage I can easily swap this for a made-up country of my own. 

I make no apology for setting much of the narrative in the fictitious naturist resort Port Libertat, which should not (of course not) be confused with the nudist enclave at Cap d'Agde where I spent so many instructive summers. 

There was an interesting hiccup in the course of the writing when I felt I must trash about forty pages. I had let the writing take me in a direction I don't really favour... cliché thriller situations, the cut-and-paste damsel-in-distress darkly violent passages I mentioned in my post concerning The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo... But I found my 'voice' again, however, and I would like to think that it is not so far removed from that of Lindsey Davis with her Falco series, even if her stories are set in ancient Rome.

Enough of self-justification. It is now up to the Authonomists and readers of my blog to give their judgement. 

Update!

How ironic! Here I am welcoming the promise of better behaviour on Authonomy and just twenty minutes after posting the manuscript I have a comment saying nice things (how much could she have read in that time?) and, of course, asking me for a tit-for-tat backing of her book. 

Update (8 September 2010)

Oh dear! Authonomy found my cover design too racy. Two tits too much! Meh!