Writing

The End

My body is heavy, my head slightly fuzzy but in a good way, pleasure is seeping from every pore. I have a faint taste of apple in my mouth and the muscles in my neck have finally un-knotted.

I have the urge to lie in a bed of silk, eating grapes from a platter whilst being stroked by beautiful men. I am slowly returning to the world after being somewhere else for some time.

I have finished the sequel to 20 Years Later. And yes, it does feel like I have just had an amazing, prolonged period of lovemaking.

I am deeply happy, relishing the sensation of achievement and still feeling the bliss of the last word typed and the last file saved. But I know this, like all other feelings, will fade, so I’ve come to press as much of it onto the page as I can, like catching a butterfly and stealing some of the dust from its wings.

Whenever I am in a particular mode I forget what it’s like to be anything else. Ask me how I write the first draft of a novel in a month’s time and I’ll have no idea – that knowledge will be locked away. Ironically someone emailed me to ask for advice on how to write serialised fiction about a week after I’d been sucked back into dedicated novel writing, and I simply haven’t been able to answer them satisfactorily. But when I pick up the Split Worlds again, I will.

So I suppose that means I should write a post about how I write the first draft of a novel in the next couple of days. But is that interesting to you? I have no idea.

Tell me if you want to know more, for now I just want to draw you into my arms, to give you the warm embrace of a writer released from her novel at last. Let’s look at that sky, filled with its dramatic autumnal clouds, and marvel at the beauty of the world.

For tomorrow, the doubts will come. And it will get ugly. But today, oh today, life is exquisite.