My priority that morning was to return to the publisher the page proofs I had completed reading. With the recycling of mail finished, I glanced through the proofs one more time, saw nothing else that needed attention, and put them with a short note into a padded envelope. I went immediately to the local mail office and sent them by priority service. They would be a day or two late arriving, but I always suspected that publishers, knowing well the forgetful ways of authors, announced a tighter deadline than was strictly necessary.

Afterwards I took out my notebook and made a few notes about what had happened when Spoder and I went to Sekonda. I was determined not to be any further involved in old murder mysteries, but I have long followed a policy of jotting down odd experiences. Ideas for stories are not always immediately obvious. Something I saw or noted or remembered from that day might be useful eventually.

In the afternoon I opened the computer document containing the first draft of my current novel, and read through it. It had been going well before my trip to Dearth, but with the extra days away from it all I could see now were examples of poor writing, weaknesses in the story and the characters.

I had been concentrating too closely on the creation of a feeling of threat, the background, and the working out of a plot. The characters looked unconvincing to me. I intended it to be a book about the psychological motive for murder, with four lead characters, all with complex and innocent lives, any one of who might turn out to be the killer. But with fewer than a hundred pages written it seemed to me that the outcome was already going to be obvious to the reader. I needed to close in on the book again, concentrate on it, rethink the structure of the plot, lay false clues, re-imagine the characters as well as the circumstances.

I knew I had been distracted not only by being away, but by too much puzzling over the Antterland murders. They were irrelevant to me, as Jo had reminded me.

After several hours of frowning unhappily at what I had done I took the decision to scrap everything and start again. I dreaded having to undertake the extra work, and I disliked the idea of an inevitable delay in delivering the completed book, but I knew it would pay off in the end. I had worked out what I thought would be a better way of tackling the book.