For those of you who suspected that putting all that time in at the bar was just an excuse, let me tell you that it paid off!  After an evening spent listening to me whimpering about how I was blocked on the plot front, a friend made a suggestion which proved to be just the breakthrough I needed.  It was such a relief to be able to send my editor a synopsis that for a while I overlooked the fact that I still had to actually write the book, and it was a bit of a shock to sit down and confront a blank screen again.  I have spent the last couple of weeks doing a very rough draft - little more than notes and scraps of dialogue – and decided this time not to try and divide it up into chapters at this stage.  Instead I aimed to fill 50 pages, the theory being that I would then just have to bulk each page out into four.  So far, I have done 35, and have given myself until the end of this weekend to finish.  I  might settle for 40+ pages, as it is proving a very slow process.  I’m too distracted by other things at the moment, and I just can’t get into writing, which is a shame, as I think the story has a lot of potential.  My part-time job is very busy at the moment, and I really want to be working on my thesis, but I’m just going to have to get over that.  I think I’d better write out a timetable and scare myself with how little time I’ve got … this book has to be finished by the end of April and the next one by the end of June, so I must get a grip and just get on with it, as my mother would say.

I’ll aim to update the writing diary again at the end of March, by which time I should have completed ten chapters in a first draft.  This should leave me plenty of time to rewrite if necessary, as it no doubt will be.  I wish I could get to the stage where I could omit this rewriting stage and get it right the first time, but this seems to be the way I work.  As it is, friends are already asking when they can expect to be bored by long moans about I can’t write, it’s all terrible, the story’s never going to work, I’m going to have to rewrite the entire thing, etc., etc. - and the answer is, probably the third week in March when I should hit the black hole of Chapter Seven …