Here it is…

…the very first draft of the new book.

Well, kind of. It is merely the posts that I wrote for CyclingEurope.org between setting off from southern Spain at the start of April to the moment I set foot on British soil again in early August (via Nordkapp of course) collated together in on place. There are nearly 88,000 words contained in the document but if you are sitting there thinking that all I have to do is add a few more tens of thousands of words to get it up to the length of a book, think again… It’s a bit more time consuming than that. When I started writing the first book I resolved to avoid using any of the text that I had written at the time and, in the main, that’s exactly what I managed to do. But it is there as a reminder and as an inspiration. Today is October 1st and my aim is to have a real first draft written by March 31st, just a few days after the Easter 2016 and exactly 6 months from now.

It’s been interesting reading the words that I wrote at the time, looking at the photographs that I took, remembering the places visited, the people I met along the way, the good days, the Mercedes days, the mountains climbed, the ferries taken, the lakes stared across… Here’s one picture from Norway which makes me wish I was still there, on the road crossing Europe on my bike. Lots more memories to think about, research to be done, jokes to be written, stories to be embellished(!) over the next 183 days…

The final version of the book should hopefully be ready for publication in the autumn of 2016 – around 12 months from now – and as things currently stand it will once again be a self-published volume. If, however, you happen to be a literary agent or publisher, don’t hesitate to get in touch! andrew@CyclingEurope.org (12 months will just give you time to republish the first two books before the final part of the trilogy is released…)