If I were editing a country, I'd definitely have chosen that president

Editing! Rewriting!

I finally admitted to myself that my first draft of Jimmy Coates: Blackout was finished. Now the real work begins.

I've been frantically cutting, chopping, changing, adding, restoring, rewriting, cutting again and moving huge chunks of the book. Every change makes it a little bit better. This is the most frustrating but also potentially the most rewarding stage of working on the books.

It's a process of spotting problems, some of them huge. That's the frustrating part. But then you puzzle out the problems and hopefully solve them in a way that seems at once elegant and obvious. That's the incredibly rewarding part.

Talking of 'incredibly rewarding'...

Would somebody please take the whole of America aside and give them a quiet pat on the back? They've done well.

I still have a cold though. Let's see Obama fix that.