Over the last month, I have finished rewriting part two of the book. This is something of a breakthrough because that required adding several brand new chapters, and overhauling significant plot details. The objective was to de-emphasise the wine element of the story, and focus on the romantic storyline.

Now that I’ve done that, and my word count is on target (There are 53,923 words across 18 chapters), the third part of the book requires much less work to finish. There are another 10 chapters to rewrite, and ideally another 8,500 words to add, to keep to my target, but that seems an much more easily achievable task than when I started this rewrite in May of this year. The idea of having the whole thing finished by Easter 2019 does not seem entirely implausible.

Before embarking on that home stretch, however, I have printed out the first two parts of the book for checking and editing - there are still changes and improvements that can be made, but so far, I’m quite pleased to discover that most of it is, to use the industry term, not shit. In fact, there are even parts of it that I am really pleased with.

I’m confident that the novel is publishable, in the sense that the writing is good enough. Whether it has the makings of a huge success is probably dependent on luck and relentless promotional work - but that’s a long way off yet.

Unfortunately, my least favourite part is the prologue, so I need to do some more work on that, since it is the section that will eventually be submitted to agents. And then is still plenty to do before that stage, but at least the end appears to be in sight.