Halmstad already exists

I don't believe it. Apparently I was a little too good at making up credible names for Scandinavian coastal communities -- there actually *is* a port of Halmstad, and not only that but it is a major Swedish city which people may well have have heard of, and which is located in quite a different region from my fictional Norwegian 'Halmstad' :-(

(The only reason I found this out was that I noticed I had changed the name to "Halvestad" halfway through Chapter 24 -- unfortunately I subsequently evidently completely forgot not only that I had done so, but the reason for the change. Like Tolkien, I tend not to go back in my manuscripts and alter earlier versions of names, but generally carry any changes forward from that point, and this has come back to bite me!)

Oh well, the ability to alter this sort of thing is one of the benefits of not publishing-as-you-go. I should probably warn my beta-readers, although I do wonder if they would actually pick up on the discrepancy :-(
(It's not really fair to ask people to read with an eye to continuity when it is up to three months between chapters...)

[Edit: "Alvestad" might be better than "Halvestad", which is Dutch!]

Late night

I stayed up until 5am for the second night running (the first of which, alas, had nothing to do with writing) and managed to get Ch25 of Arctic Raoul rough-typed in its entirety; this is basically the characters exchanging life stories as to what has been happening while they were apart, so that the author can assume that everybody knows everything about both sides of the story from this point onwards. It is also an awful lot of R/C fluff ;-)