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Crisis only narrowly averted when I realised I had forgotten to include a picture of some tallysticks among the illustrations.  Idiot.

Picture Perfect

Things are moving on quickly now.  I've signed three copies of the contract, and have filled in an author publicity form.  Now I have to choose pictures for the book and send a list to OUP before the end of the month, so they can start getting licences for those which I'm not getting from work.  Selecting them is difficult - there are at least a hundred I could use, but I have to get it down to 35.

In the end I decided the easiest way was to lay everything out on
the floor to see how they looked side by side...



Stage Six: A Publishing Contract!

I'm over the moon to announce that this morning a contract for Conflagration by Oxford University Press dropped through my letterbox.  Regular readers of this blog will know that something has been in the offing for at least a month now, but only now am I able to reveal what.  I had more than one offer, and a number of other publishers were very tempted, so I'm delighted with the response from the trade so far.  There are various minor changes to make, based on the feedback of two anonymous 'readers', plus quite a lot of presentational changes to fit with OUP's house style (in particular, insertion of the famous Oxford comma).  But that is all completely do-able before 1 October, when I have to get the finalised manuscript back to my editor.  News on this blog will now switch to describing the journey towards publication: as one trip ends, another begins...

In the meantime, if you need a recap, here is a synopsis of my book.