Do you listen to music while you work?

Evening kids,

How's things? You will have noticed my blogging activity has increased. Benefits of being off work right there.

Anyway, I've spent a very productive evening listening to The Man Who by Travis and currently I'm halfway through Odds and Sods by The Who. The dog - Ralph - is asleep next to me on the couch and I've got the first 105 pages of the new novel in much better shape.

I do find that I focus better when I have music on. It has to be at quite a low volume, background almost, and then I sort of know it's there but I can concentrate on what I'm doing in a way that I struggle to do when the room is completely silent.

Quick update on the new novel then. I've tweaked a couple of characters, their relationship to each other actually, so that key scenes make a lot more sense now. The aim of this draft - the second - is just to make sure the plot holds together and to spot any glaring errors. Then I'll do a third draft where I pretty it all up, sort the formatting, grammar, lob some colour on it all I suppose.

But I'm pretty happy with it so far. However I've been known to do some pretty major rewrites at this stage before so we shall see. In a fun twist, the novel is set in and around Morecambe, specifically the Winter Gardens. Guess where the wife is tonight? Yep, Winter Gardens watching a colleague and a friend in a performance of Beauty and the Beast. I was going to go but then we got Ralph. I have to admit I'm pretty happy to be here rather than there.

Anyway, that's it for now. As ever my late evening plans are to watch more Breaking Bad on Netflix and drink ale.