I finished the first draft of The Man Who Lived Again today. I shall celebrate by throwing it in the back of a drawer and not looking at it again until the middle of next week. That's the best way to treat these things. Months is an even better way of finding out if what you wrote was any good or not but it's not super incredibly long, so a week should be enough.
Then I must figure out what to do with it but that can wait until it's finished for real.
Wrapping that has given me a jolt in the arm too. Seeing some pages mount up is always good for the soul - no matter how confident you might be to the outside world, those doubts can set in for anybody and if you let them take hold, they can really start a riot in your head.
Anyway, while I'm in the frame of mind for this kind of 10,000 word novella format, I'm going to wrap up another I have lying around. This one is running with the name Just Like Living In Paradise and is in the same rusty nail format as this one was when I picked it up, so spirits are high that if I turn up in front of the paper with a pen and bleed like a prize fighter who needs to pay the rent, I can lick it into 'drawer-shape' by the end of the month... which is apparently just a couple of weeks away.
I found myself in the news yesterday and I wasn't even there! My friend Siân (horror actress, tattoo model, all round good egg and lovely person) was on Heno - a Welsh magazine show - talking about... well, I don't actually know what she was talking about because I haven't watched it yet but messages from back home kept bouncing around in my phone saying she was on and had mentioned the Big Bear Rescue project.
Any moment now, it should go online and I'll catch up. My Welsh is awful these days. I might need the assistance of subtitles to keep up - or my mother!
...and while I'm on the subject of things in foreign languages, this hit BBC4 at the weekend and is worth a watch:
If you go hunting for it, it's called I Know Who You Are. Highly recommended.
And now, back to work. Today I am accompanied by songs from the wonderful Sade simply because I need to listen to something unquestionably beautiful as I pick at scars with long fingernails.
Balance. Balance. Balance.