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Ashes
12 September 2005
These last couple of weeks I’ve been working really well, doing a solid thousand words a day and sometimes more. Runs like these, they do of course have to come to an end; generally, though, when you’re as close as this to a finish, they end when the piece ends, and the problem is to start afresh with something new. There’s a sprint mechanism that cuts in as soon as an ending hoves into sight, just got to get there. In the same way that the journey home is always quicker than the journey out, so the second half of something is always quicker to write than the first, and the final pages are hectic.
So here I am, poised on the very brink of finishing the first Taiwan novella, literally only the ending to write now; and I haven’t touched it for days, and that is just so unusual, it’s a weird place to stop; and the other unusual thing, I’m not complaining, I’m not blaming anyone, I’m not excoriating myself with self-loathing.
Thing is, I haven’t been writing because I’ve been having fun. Simple as that. We went to the garlic festival at Snod’s Edge (no, honestly, we did...), and we had a wine-tasting lunch with a dozen of us being far less serious than you’d think over fifteen bottles or so, and like that. And I do like that. And this morning I might have worked, only I’d promised to go to a press show; so I went and it was cancelled, and I came home thinking I’d work, but of course there was cricket. The last day of the last test in this Ashes series, and it was dreadfully tense and unpredictable, and it all came down to the last session, and it was all very good in the end. So England has regained the Ashes, a mere matter of eighteen years on, and the Australians are vincible after all, and we vinced them. Hurrah.
I can finish the novella another day. That'll be fine...
© Chaz Brenchley 2005
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.