So, same old story.  The first four chapters go well.  The characters feel new and fresh and the plot full of potential.  It’s going to be a good one, I think smugly.  Then I hit Chapter Five.  There’s something about those middle chapters, Five to Seven, which turns the whole business into a chore.  Enthusiasm gives you the momentum to get going, and then everything starts to slow down until you suddenly find that you’ve got to Chapter Eight and you’ve still got half the plot to fit in, and it all ends in a rush.  At the weekend, I got bogged down in an incredibly boring scene in Chapter Six that I knew would have to go, but somehow I couldn’t get myself out of it.  But whenever I complained to friends about how it was going, they would mime yawns to show they’d heard it all before, so I suppose I’ll just have to plod on.  I’ve nearly finished Chapter Seven, which means that things should start looking up, ...

I’d better be quick, as it’s 7.30 pm, and I haven’t even started the six pages of Chapter Three which I am scheduled to write tonight.  So far – frantically paw at any wood in sight -  I am keeping to my timetable, which I have stuck on the end of the bookcase behind me.  True, I got to the end of Chapter One and woke up the next morning realising that it was all wrong and that I would have to rewrite it entirely, but given that this usually happens when I’ve struggled as far as Chapter Seven, I’m taking it as a good sign, and feel as if I’ve saved myself at least six chapters of angst.

I had a lovely weekend in London, which was looking at its best at the end of May.  Went to the Chelsea Flower Show and bought a ridiculously large pot of the palest of pink lavender, which I then had to carry on the tube in the rush hour, not to mention all the way back to York, but it turned out to be an amazing icebre ...

Last November everything broke, now everything is disappearing into thin air.  Over the course of the last few days I’ve left a bag in a shop and lost my stapler, a sheet of wrapping paper and the pointy thing that goes with the CD player, all of which I know must be somewhere in my study.  None of these things may be vital, but it is still incredibly irritating, and the more I can’t find any of them, the crosser I get.  And even more annoying is when one reappears without warning in a place where I couldn’t  possibly have missed seeing it for the last three days, like the pointy thing which unaccountably turned up a few minutes ago smack in the middle of my desk on top of a book.  I am darkly convinced there are other forces at work!  This would also account for the fact that I managed to lose a trainer in a changing cubicle at the gym, which after all is not that large an area to search thoroughly.   I then had th ...