I now have a complete Draft 2 of Graveyards of Nereis, pending spellcheck and proof-read. Though spellcheck is a doleful prospect. My default spelling is British, since it was in Scotland that spelling was drummed into me, as far as it went. (Much rewriting of misspelled words; much learning of synonyms to circumvent use of certain words, such as ‘receive’). But I’m using MS Word. And I’m writing SF. There are going to be a lot of squiggly red underlines to pick through, with trips to my old red Chambers or my newer Collins as final arbiter, because I am not a confident speller, and I don’t dare put anything into the spellchecker memory without verification. But I won’t let MS Word grammar check for me. I am a law-abiding person, but grammar must be subordinated to (a) sense and (b) sound and rhythm. To take an example, some sentences simply need the softness of ‘which’ in them; ‘that’ is just too harsh if the other words in the sentence are soft ones, or I am trying to characterize the speaker as someone gentle or diffident. And I will resist to my last misplaced comma the devolution of the wonderful, supple, quirky English language into a form dictated by the programmers at Microsoft!