The 25,000 word barrier has been breached!

Hit just over 25K last night, which means that the novel is now a quarter of its total expected length (which also means that it'll probably run over into 120,000, just like Cold Witness). Christina, Amy, Mr Sloan and Mr Akenham have just landed in England. I decided to have them staying for a few nights on the Woodbridge Base, largely to introduce the UFO-type subplots that run throughout the story. Johnny's been introduced, too, and there was a rather interesting scene in which Christina (that's ex-Johnny's-girlfriend Christina) rings up his flat, only to find out that he's been married for two years. Which is, as you can imagine, a shock, especially as Christina never really let Johnny go. They'll be interacting a lot over the rest of the book, so I'm interested to see how this particular situation develops.

That said, I think I may be starting to drift. There hasn't been a lot of direct conflict lately ... it's been more passive. So I should be right on track to up the tension.

Oh yes, and I've updated the page graphics over the weekend to create a new 'feel' for the site. Note new AR logo (the old one was nearly [gasp] six months old) and new page titlebar in line with the new nature/mountains with metallic border style. I've also added a little graphic in the Comments stylesheet. I've created four of them; one for each season, with different backgrounds selected from various photos. The current one is winter, and shows snow on a bracken frond.