It’s the last day of school holidays.

Autumn beckons, though no doubt we’ll have several weeks of warmth and brilliant sunshine once the kids have gone back to school. And I am having the slight wobble I do at this time of year, as the wheel turns and my daughter goes into a new year.

I’ve written about this before, how empty the house feels when she goes back, how much I miss her. Despite all the dancing orangutans and minions and Keep Calm posters showing up on my Facebook feed, extolling various joyous captions about ‘the kids going back to school!’, I don’t really feel that way.

And yet.

There is a delicious sense of freedom that first day back, coming home to a quiet house, the hours stretching before me to work uninterrupted. For I have a lot of work to do. Yesterday my editor sent me the final edit of No Quarter, the next book in my Ambeth series. It’s just sitting in my Writing folder like an unopened gift, waiting for me to delve into the pages and make final adjustments before hitting Publish and sharing it with the world.

So there is a lot of planning to do, some promotion and finalising the cover, updating Goodreads and Amazon, getting in touch with libraries and reviewers to let them know it’s being published.

The spreadsheet documenting my daughter’s summer social activities* will come down from the study wall, to be replaced with a marketing schedule for my new book, and a list of term dates as we count down to the next precious days we get to spend together.

And I will turn my focus back to work, the balance swinging to the other side of the page.

*yes, I had to do a spreadsheet, after missing an arranged ‘date’ with a friend – it’s the only way I could manage it. The child has a better social life than I do! 🙂