Back from France, back to work...

The title says it all, really. I spent New Year in France, and now I'm back - 20,000 words to go on the novel, which is nothing, really, so I hope to finish it before the end of the month. Ha.

So today and tomorrow are the last days of my holiday, and I'm acclimatising. Which means doing some laundry, fiddling about on my computer, and googling myself. NEVER google yourself. It's like eavesdropping. It's invariably depressing. If someone says something nice about you, you'll get to hear about it. If not... well, better left unread, I'd say.

What is worse is that I discovered, quite by accident, that my publishers have published a book about the Children's Crusade this January.

To understand why this is an issue, the backstory you need to know is: I wrote a book about the Children's Crusade two or three years ago, which was meant to be the next book after A Trick of the Dark. Except that Bloomsbury explained that it would be much better to sit on it until 2012, which is the 800th anniversary, and so I ended up writing Tyme's End for the same deadline. They agreed that it would come out early in 2012, so that it would be the first in a possible spate, not just another Children's Crusade book. (See where I'm going with this one?)

Now, there may be very good reasons why Linda Press Wulf's book won't make any difference to mine, and looking at the blurb it looks very different (and good, incidentally - I'm definitely going to read it), and maybe it's better to be published in the anniversary year than just before. But what bothers me - really bothers me - is that no one even mentioned it. Not in an email, not formally - which is OK, I understand that editors and publishers simply don't have time to keep writers posted on every little detail - but not even at the Christmas party, for example, when I was talking about the Children's Crusade and it might have come up quite naturally in conversation...

OK, maybe I'm getting paranoid. No, I am paranoid. But all the same - am I being unreasonable? I don't think so. Maybe because I'm paranoid...

This is why you should never google yourself. Or anyone else, for that matter. Moral of the story: just get on with your work, for heaven's sake.