HIGH AND LOW

I've had some lows in my writing life this year. In February I had to abandon a half-written novel. Hopefully I'll pick it up again but it seemed dead at the time. Then I had an event at the local library where no one turned up who I didn't already know. These are the things that can happen to a writer. (This writer, at least.)

But you also get highs - I got to jet over to New York for BEA. I got to say I'm finally a full-time writer (although that's not necessarily a good thing, me being laid off from my day job). And yesterday I had the biggest high of all - finishing an MS.

I wrote "The End" a few weeks ago, but the cigar I had then didn't taste right, knowing as I did how many problems were still lurking in that MS, crying to be fixed. So I've spent the interim tackling them, and now the bug list is down to zero. I have run the spell check (never a small task with my books) and the MS is printed out, ready for one last pass of pencil editing which I have never found to be that onerous.

Out of all the milestones in all the cycles a writer goes through, I think this is my favourite. For months you walk around, weighed down by something and not even realising it. It is the problems, the battle that is always going on somewhere in your head. And that battle is won.

I took the dogs out for a walk and looked at the sun setting behind the Malvern Hills and felt like I had snorted cocaine (I hadn't, I promise). I could look at trees and birds and even dustbins and see the beauty in them. But it will be short-lived, won't it, that dustbin moment? Already I have something else planned, a great idea for a book just waiting to be put into words. Or maybe I could re-animate one of those dead MSs. And the moment you type that first sentence, the problems begin all over...

Until I get the dustbin moment again.