Long days in autumn

It's been a long day, but a good one, I think. I love getting up in the dark, these days before it's too cold, and making coffee and starting work. Today I was writing at 6 a.m, which is unusual... but exciting, too. It's like there's no impediment between what's in your head and what you want on the page. No internal censor. And I'm writing some crucial bits in the middle of my novel... bits where everything is turning rather strange and phantasmagorical. That feeling of lucid dreaming seems important. Fester the cat comes and sits by me on my desk as I write. He sheds hair everywhere and tries to batter the printer with both paws.

Then it was a day of different jobs: going over edited chapters of my next teen novel, emailed over from Simon and Schuster. Reading and making editorial notes on the last four story submissions for Obverse Books' 'The Panda Book of Horror', which I'm working on with Stuart. And being delighted with how our authors are just *getting* Iris and Panda right. Going into town and to the English department for a tea time do to welcome the new MA students to the Writing School - and to welcome back those returning for the writing-up year on their novels. Lots of familiar faces in the cavernous atrium of the Geoffrey Manton building, and some new ones too - and a lovely sense of new workshops and courses about to unwind and unroll. I'm about to start my 'Children's Lit' course, and kicking off with Eve Garnett and E. Nesbit: fantasy and harsh realism in the early twentieth century.

In the middle of all of this - at about two in the afternoon - I'm stopping to read some Stephen King and I drift off for a half hour nap. (Nearly forty!). Fester the cat is lying on my chest, of course. He'll find me wherever I am around the house and come to sit with me or on me. We both fall asleep on the settee. And after precisely half an hour I wake up - and I know exactly what I need to do with the rest of that strange middle section of my novel. The plot has clicked into place. I know the reasons for all the mysterious choices I've made so far. I know the revelations and epiphanies to come. It's all just slotted into place - and through the medium of a nap.

Then I've got to dash upstairs and get notes written about this plotting stuff before the cobweb strands of all those knotty decisions start to snap.

And tonight... arriving home after the MMU reception, and Jeremy home after his long day away on trains in Wales... there's the next episode of 'Hornets' Nest' for me to listen to. The Circus of Doom... with bearded ladies on the high wire, venetian midgets, monochrome clowns with painted lips and nails... And it's very, very creepy. The series is getting stranger and more sinister. I have a listen with headphones on, loving all the hurdy-gurdy circus music and the layering of kerfuffle and narration. Tom's on fine fettle. His Doctor is appalled and fierce... but there's a relish he takes in the macabre, as well... I love listening to these new episodes. It's like being inside my own dreams.