I am still working on the novel...

...And there is this little passage which I am very fond of and which is oddly independent of everything else, though actually it is there to sell quite an important plot point not only for the section it is in, but for the whole of the book. A plot point sufficiently important that I cheated a little bit and on discovering that Edward Gibbon died in January 1794 when I needed him around in June, made him a ghost, haunting his Lausanne house and endlessly checking the footnotes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

New readers need to know that my narrator, Mara, is several thousand years old and wanders the world killing gods and magicians whose powers derive from mass murder - slightly amoral and mildly nuts...

( But here she is mostly listening to someone else for a change )