For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, here’s a small update on the status of my novel and its author.

First of all, the English draft of the novel is finished and I have an idea for a title. The working title of the series was The Marvellous Voyages of the Queen Anne, and I always knew it was never going to be the final title, but I teased my beta-readers with an acronym. Well, now they know what it stood for.

The next steps are:
1. querying for sensitivity readers (I have a good option in mind, but she’s fairly expensive for the current status of my pockets… more on that later);
2. querying for an agent to represent me.

This week I wanted to start looking into both: there’s material to be produced, and material I massively suck at, such as outlines and a synopsis. That’s when it happened.

I live at the ground floor of a fairly old building (think XIX century). It’s vernacular architecture, nothing fancy, but we have a wooden ceiling and very thick walls, with a massive industrial-style entrance door in glass and iron.
The building is in the canal district, a very popular place for people who want to party and, as you might imagine, for the Norwegian Rat.

If you’re thinking “I know where this is going”, you’re probably right.

Rats have always been a problem. My upstairs neighbour, one of my least favourite people in the world right now, has been neglecting a rat infestation in her floor for almost a decade because it doesn’t affect her much and she could afford to live somewhere else.
The problem got worst and worst.
It meant we sometimes had to sleep with all the lights on, waking up to scratching noises in the middle of the night and rushing to spray natural repellents or bang stuff against the ceiling (a historical wooden ceiling with massive supporting beams and planks thrown across them). There’s only so much you can do while you live inside the house.

The fear has always been they would find a way to munch through the wood and break havoc or dig a hole in the wall and break in.
They never succeeded.
Before this month.

On Thursday I was determined to find the source of a very unpleasant odour and… well, I discovered I had a rat nest right behind my favourite spot for working, writing and dining. I thought it was my corner. It turns out I was sharing it with neighbours.
The bad smell was one of such neighbours, who had decided to crawl inside a container and die.

I still fancy him more than the upstairs neighbour.

Now we’re carefully inspecting everything we have and packing it as fast as we can since there’s no guarantee there isn’t more of them roaming around at night. It will take months.

But that’s not all, folks!

This morning I woke up coming down with a cold and, of course, I took covid test. Guess what? I won’t be packing any boxes of books any time soon: I’ll be at my current shelter, unpacking DVDs to recycle the boxes and pondering around the meaning of life.

Meanwhile, I left my novel with my trusted beta readers and my heart still hopes I’ll be able to assemble some material for a couple of sensitivity editors. Am I dreaming? Send good vibes.