Thanks again, everyone. It still feels like a milestone, even when it's your (I think) 41st! When you've been working on something entirely alone for fifteen months, it's always in the back of your mind that this time you may have made a Horlicks of it. It's quite a relief when someone tells you No, it's fine, you weren't imagining things.
But the retirement I was talking about was retiring from writing. A few years back it looked as if the train had come to the end of the tracks. I'd just about got used to the idea of being footloose and fancy-free when my current publisher got in touch and asked for a peek at the manuscript.
(Incidentally, what do we call them now? Manuscript is clearly out of date - but so is typescript, when what you submit is a data file attached to an e-mail. Anyway, you know what I mean.)
No, if you're retiring from doing something else, I'd heartily recommend writing as a second career. Particularly if you've got a pension coming in to cover the necessities, it's as good a way of keeping the old brain-cells firing as any. And there's always the chance of being Discovered...
