Catch 22

I've been sat on my bed reading for an hour, Kiwa curled up on my legs with late afternoon light glowing through the window, trying to fill my head with words that I can dump effectively onto a new page of my book, which is coming along by the way. I met Barbara the other day for lunch. She's my commissioning editor. She walked into Starbucks beside Holland Park tube and greeted me with the words, 'Hello Author. Because that's what you are now.' I was quite chuffed at that, and then proceeded to ask her lots of questions about how the book was to be distributed in Australia and when my advance was going to arrive. You know, the serious stuff. I've learned to be honest in the past two years, not that I wasn't before please realise, but honest in the form of actually going ahead and asking or saying things that sometimes you wouldn't, because it's embarassing or something similar. What I'm getting at, is the following. I told Barbara, to some degree, that I was finding it a little hard to believe that I am capable of retracing the footsteps of my last two years. Going through the whole journey again and then writing it down isn't an easy process. To think about, let alone actually do. In all honesty, I'm fucking terrified that now I have this chance to be an author I'm going to write down such a bunch of drivel that no one will want to read it. It's all I ever wanted, you see, and I can't afford to write a pile of tat that will have my writing career hanging in a WaterStones exit this time next year. Who would have thought that skateboarding across Australia would be one of the easiest things I had to do this decade? (PS. Barbara, try not to worry. I'll learn to harness the fear and turn it into something good. Honest.)