It's Only A Paper Rose

My experience with writing is that writing makes writing easier. Sounds trite, probably is. But it did mean I managed to extrude a novel-shaped object (with a writing hiatus of ~2 monhts, as I was trying to figure out how to deal with intelligent adversaries and a protagonist with more sense of duty than sense of self-preservation, leading to said protagonist expiring in an exceedingly messy (although not graphically described) fashion, about half-way through the NSO).