By which I mean I’ve actually delivered it now, all edited and everything. Almost exactly a year after I started plotting it. Man, this one took me a long time!
As ever, the feeling of delivery is actually kinda anticlimactic. I email it away to my editor, I look around the empty room a bit, I think ‘Hm, what shall I do now?’ Then I toddle off and tidy up a random corner of the flat or make some toast or bat at the toggle of a window blind for a while. I know it’ll be coming back to me in about a month with various corrections and changes. I hope they won’t be anything serious that can’t be fixed with a couple of sentences here and there, rather than the old finger-busting rewrites I used to have to do back in Braided Path days. I’ll probably take the rest of the week off (ie tomorrow) and next week I’ll start thinking about something new.
Not a book, though. Right now I feel like I never want to write another description of anything again, ever. I really badly need a break from prose work to freshen up the ole batteries or whatever. Probably I’ll get into doing some screenwriting for a bit. Comics. Video game work. Maybe a pamphlet of haiku. Some performance poetry. Copywriting for adverts. Possibly not those last three.
A world of possibilities has opened before me. I stare into the wide open spaces and think: ‘Ooo. What sort of story shall I tell next?’
Right now, I don’t know. It’s sort of nice.
