Contest winner (and personal shame) REVEALED

The lines are closed, the votes have been counted and verified (and giggled at), and I can now reveal that the winner of JUST A CONTEST is...

BeckyS! Woohoo! Congrats, Becky. Please email me your details and your choice of prize.

Becky guessed that I used the dreaded 'just' 501 times in Entangled. I actually used it 533 times. Yup, you read that right. 533 times. The shame, the horror, the incompetence.

I must thank those of you who thought I couldn't possibly be that rubbish, and guessed lovely low numbers. You'll know better next time.

I started going through the copy-edit yesterday. I thought I'd be able to nail it this weekend, but I only got a quarter of the way through the ms after a full day's work (admittedly, that included a small amount of idling on Twitter too). It turns out that this is HARD. I'm reading sentences and thinking 'I would NEVER write that now'. Luckily I'm allowed to make some teeny-tiny tweaks at this stage, but it's time-consuming! I'm taking great satisfaction from extrerminating a few more 'justs'. Die, you suckers, DIE! Um... yes. I think my copy-edit might me making me crazy.

On an entirely unrelated matter, Becky (aka The Bookette) asked a very interesting question yesterday. I can't imagine where she got the inspiration from!

If your next door neighbour liked to sing karaoke all day long which song would it be that tipped you over the edge?

I've given this some serious thought, and I'm going to have to go with Michael Jackson's Earth Song. When I was studying for my A-levels, a man in the flat upstairs used to listen to this song on repeat for hours and hours on end. Unsurprisingly, this drove me round the twist. I reckon that hearing a neighbour singing that (badly, no doubt) could just tip me over the edge. I would not be respinsible for my actions in such a situation, so let's hope it doesn't happen.