Flying the nest

An amazing cacophony this morning: the baby jackdaws in the nest nearby hadn't flown before I got back from Wales after all, and they flew this morning. For about five minutes there was a huge squawking as the parents shoved the fledglings around, chasing them up the pitched roof opposite, up to the ridge tiles where they had no choice but to take off, swooping down and practically knocking them off the TV aerial, and generally yelling. And now they've gone and all is silent.

And yesterday I spent the day working on the changes to my novel suggested by John, being tough enough with it (I hope) to make it fly, and now it's ready to go to my early readers and all is going quiet at last in my head. Actually, just like the parent jackdaws I've had enough of it now: I kept glancing at pages where I'd made the changes and thinking that the changes had spoilt the rhythm, but the only way I could be sure of that is with a proper read-through and some distance, so I'm leaving it to others for the present: my fabulous, eagle-eyed, mince-no-words, I-just-like-a-good-story early readers.

I rang Printing.com in Didsbury yesterday to cost getting copies made and bound for them, which I have done in the past, and it turned out that it would now cost almost forty quid for one copy! 12p a page with no discount for volume! And when it costs so much less to properly print a book! It was never that expensive before the shop was taken over by Printing.com and was a little local service. So I won't be doing that, that's for sure: I'll be standing at my printer running off my own and wielding the old punch and bunging the pages together with treasury tags.