Pop-quiz, hotshot:

You’re a newbie author for whom things are going unexpectedly well. You have a number of reasons for celebration. You’ve finished the first draft of your second book well ahead of schedule. You’ve sold your US rights for more than pocket-change. Your first royalty cheque came through not all that long ago. It’s time to reward yourself. Time to give yourself a little pat on the back for working so hard. Do you:

a) Take youself off to Las Vegas for a long weekend and go mental?

b) Carefully invest in a high-interest savings account and plan to pay off your mortgage over the next six trilogies?

c) Hire a babysitter and take your wife/girlfriend away for a luxury evening of champagne and caviar ?

d) Not bother with the babysitter and take someone else’s wife/girlfriend out instead?

e) Buy a Lego Death Star and spend the next few days feverishly building to the exclusion of all else including food, sleep and sex?

I shall say no more except to point out the bit about the first draft of King of the Crags being finished again. If I start asking for Lego Star Wars mini-figures in exhange for signing copies of anything, it’s sheer co-incidence. Or it’s for the kids. Yes, that’ll do, it’s for the kids, right?