I've REALLY got that feeling!

I’m not sure I adequately expressed, yesterday, just how exciting it is to be a writer.

It isn’t always exciting. Sometimes, it’s a colossal pain in the arse, mostly it’s lovely, often it’s a privilege. Days like yesterday, days like today, are rare, though. They are rare and wonderful, and they make everything worth while. 

It wouldn’t matter if I was never published (much easier to say now that I have an agent than it ever was before, but not less true), it would still be worth everything to feel the way I feel today and the way I felt yesterday about a new project, about the possibilities.

If I can only manage to express this adequately and do that right, and do justice to this thought and capture the quintessence of that idea then this book will be the very best thing I have ever written. It might even be the very best thing I am capable of writing right now... if not ever.

I don’t know if you can imagine that feeling, but I do know that I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t felt that, who doesn’t know what that’s like.

The day will come, of course, when I have done what I can do, and my attempt will fall short of my expectation, of what I thought I might be able to achieve, but that’s to do with being human and fallible; that’s to do with not being Jane Austen or Virginia Wolf, or Muriel Sparks or... take your pick.

There will be some pain, for a while, but then I will read the book again, a few weeks or a couple of months after the first draft is complete, and I will fall a little bit in love with bits and pieces of it, and I will see ways to make the least good bits better, and I will begin to build a relationship with the words. It will all end, one day, in a sad parting, but, I hope, a respectful one.

Right now, I am in the first heady rush of pleasure. I know that I am willing to open my heart and fall in love.

It’s just as well, because I also know that this book requires that I open a vein. This is one of those ideas that will come to nothing if I do not give it blood... Lots and lots of blood.

Come back in three months time and see how I’m talking about this book then. I suspect it ain’t gonna be anything like as pretty as this.

That’s OK, though, because, right here, right now, I’m basking in the glory of this feeling, wallowing in it, bathing... Floating away on a...