High Spirits and Low Self Esteem

 Finished a novel yesterday. I finished it for the third time, in fact. It has now reached the stage where I'm happy enough to show it to someone else. The first two drafts were mewling, puking things, cemented behind the walls of Glamis Castle, and fed with weekly buckets of fish heads to appease their unfortunate appetites. 

This version is allowed out on its own. Mittens on strings. Telephone number in a clip purse in its pocket. But allowed out.  

It's called How Ghosts Affect Relationships. 

It's probably about halfway finished. I expect there are things wrong with it. Things I can't see, just now. There are inklings. Niggles. Is the shape wrong? Do we spend to much time with one character? Is it confusing? Is the distance between high fantasy and low humour too large. Is the ending earned? Is the middle earned? Is the beginning earned? Gratifying, at least, to see it has all three. 

It has no genre. Or it has a lot of genres, fighting like kittens in a sack. It's a ghost story but isn't intended to be scary. It's an examination of metropolitan alienation, with jokes. It's loftily metaphysical and grubbily physical. Its a marriage of the supernatural with the hyper-mundane. The actual John Barleycorn turns up in a story already lousy with drunkards. It's funny, sad, obsessive, weird, grubby and life-affirming. It does more than one thing, which makes it difficult to place in a world obsessed with compartmentalisation. As you can see, I find it difficult to describe it and I wrote it. 

I may need to work on that. 

Unlike the chap in Misery, I didn't celebrate the end of my toil with a single cigarette and a glass of champagne, as I don't smoke and I'm not currently drinking. 

So, I did my tax return, which was quite the opposite. 

Sobering. 

As fuck.