Bit of Christmas Appreciation and Reflection

Christmas. that happened.

There was about a week of food preparation for three days of non-stop eating. I'm sure many can relate to that. we had a Christmas eve dinner which extended late into the night (I lit fire poi's and avoided incident). Christmas breakfast involved copious amounts of cream cheese, croissants, ham, jam and butter. Breakfast morphed into lunch which lasted roughly twelve hours and included a serious bucket of pina colada slushies which melted in the sun, and -mixed with black currant shnapps- turned to sickly, sweet alchoholic syrup... lunch lasted well beyond dinner, several bottles of sunscreen, bubbly and two groups of guests. Then came boxing day morning -chocolate- then a whole day on the beach with friends eating BBQ'd sausages and left overs. Then there was another gathering for the third dinner of Christmas.
To sum it up I am sun burnt, happy and have eaten enough to feed a small village.

All of this plus the recent flooding of our little city (few hundred homes evacuated and red-stickered, lots of slips and roads closed) has left my book a little lonely for the past week. I have managed to write a half chapter  and have spent some time working on bits i need to plant here and there..
I'm looking forward to returning to it with a vengeance. Being more that half way there on my first extraordinarily rough and bare-bones draft, has made me quite confident that i will finish it in a couple of months. ( fingers crossed )
                                                                 Appreciation
I'm beginning to really appreciate the select handful of people who have shown a fair amount of enthusiasm for this mammoth project. I have put my all into it and it's nice to have people approach me and ask questions. There's also the friends who have been condemned to hear me talk about it at all times, and they listen, which makes me keen to carry on. I don't think I truly appreciated the amount of work that writing a book would take when I started this. It's not the obvious stuff (planning, editing, writing) but the little things, like making sure every paragraph is interesting and all of the tiny loose ends get their answers somewhere along the line, making sure every character is where they should be, sacrificing the small things that occupied my time before this (I haven't been for a good walk in a while) trying to talk it up to people, planning the demise of characters I love...