I’m dreaming of a…

I am dreaming. Not necessarily of a white Christmas as I can only tolerate 24 hours of snow before I need it to go away so I can walk the streets again. Being tall I am like Bambi on ice and having once broken a shoulder and a wrist (although on my bedroom carpet not on ice - Top tip: never try rolling on a balance board for stress relief) I have no wish to risk my precious bones again. Anyway I digress.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been writing and working like a little demon churning out books faster than Penguin can print them and now I am done for the year. I have finished my edits on Elizabeth and Marilyn and whisper it I have a new idea.

New ideas are delicious - it’s like a new love affair. They are enticing in their sheer perfection. They have not yet reached the stage of disappointing you by failing to live up to your exacting standards. This is why some people never finish a book however much they say they want to be a writer. Writers finish things and live with their failure to be perfect. I think that’s brave because our lack of perfection reminds us we are human.

It’s hard to fail, to see only the flaws in our work. Authors employ various strategies to deal with the glaring truth of it. Some dose the pain with drugs and alcohol and others like me choose never to read the book again after the proofread. That way I can admire my beautiful covers on the shelf without sighing and saying ‘Damn I wish I’d done this differently.’

It’s like wishing you’d run a race differently and equally pointless.

Books last longer than races but the making of them is a temporary thing. We are finite beings and the artistic process takes us from the dreaming stage to the final checking of our prose in the blink of an eye.

What can we do except move on and begin dreaming again?

So this week I began dreaming of a new book that will be all that I want it to be. Being an author may be the best drug of all.

In other news my sparkly lights are up and work is over so I am fully dedicating myself to long scented baths with a good book. Having lost my reading mojo for some time I have polished off Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Eli’s Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky and enjoyed both although I have mixed feelings about Sally’s syntax and the inevitable lecture on capitalism that falls out of every character’s mouth even if they’re just eating their cereal.

The joy of being able to fully immerse myself in a big chonky book is delighting me though as I lie on my sofa watching my fairy lights twinkle.

I am also thinking about who to be in the New Year. It’s part of a game I play with myself. Perfectionists love a New Year. We can be perfect for a brief window. Maybe this New Year I’ll just come as myself. What a radical thought!

Thanks for your company this year and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And yes I do have Elizabeth and Marilyn Xmas baubles.

And if you need to hear this - write the damn book. Dreaming is lovely and perfectionism is just fear of not being enough, but FINISHED has a quality all of its own.

Jx