I've moved back to posting at my blog at In These Heels?

If you want to read more, you can find me there.

I have a sneaking desire to avoid a "review of the year" style entry. I suppose it might be useful to do a round-up of events, just to put them behind me and move on to other, newer things.

2008 began with a kind of glamorous destitution, an artistic poverty combined with a classic set of family issues. I wasn't speaking to my mother. In December 2007, we fell out because I wanted to take my writing seriously and she didn't want me to. I had come to the end of a contract and nothing else had appeared. I thought, at that point, I was headed for serious financial hell, until a friend bailed me out for a few months.

In January, after nudging from another friend, I approached him to ask for advice on producing Amnar: Book One as a podcast. At the time, he was working for a studio, so we were able to record with the best quality equipment. In a precarious position, I survived month by month, trying and failing to find some kind of regular income. It amazes me now that I coped, because I felt like I was constantly terrified. It was only when I flew off into the space where I had absolutely nothing left that being scared became completely irrelevant. I sat back and enjoyed the sunshine of summer.

We launched the first series of podcasts in March, as I suddenly discovered it was much easier to have nothing than I'd ever imagined. I've known people dedicate an entire life to avoiding what I was facing, but when I finally had to face having no money to pay the rent, to eat food the next day, it was a lot less scary. I remember thinking to myself two things. The first was that all the wealth in the world would never compare to what I had in my head - Amnar - and the second was that since my body would carry on whether I had money or not, somehow I would survive.

I was really struggling, at the time, with that problem I've discussed before which made it almost impossible to do anything constructive with Amnar in terms of getting it published. I was sending off queries left, right and centre, but was still deeply relieved when they were either ignored or rejected. In May and June I couldn't pay the rent; I had completely run out of all resources. By chance, I decided to attend Sangha night and met Liaison, for what turned out to be the fling of the year.

Liaison is still a large figure in my consciousness. He was the first person I'd met who was in many ways doing what I was doing, forging his own path. Everybody else I knew just worked in a corporate job. It was a strange time: I was happy without reason because I felt so free, and yet my material life was spiralling down the tube. There's a point where you stop worrying, stop panicking and stop waking up in terror because the mind and body can only cope with so much.

It's very difficult to explain what happened over that month. I met Liaison by chance and we connected completely and instantly. He took me out for meals and we'd sit up until well into the next day just talking. He bailed me out of my rent problem as I was threatened with eviction. As we rolled into July, he took me out in a helicopter for my first flying experiment, and then for a weekend to his house in Cheshire. It was the break I needed as my life fell apart. He had been through four evictions, so he knew how to handle what I was going through.

July arrived, and I had nothing left at all. My landlord tried to get me out of the apartment via illegal means. There were rushed visits to free legal support groups, conversations on the phone with various people. Liaison and I split up, and then I had a phone call offering me a very highly paid contract for three months. I didn't have to interview for it. Given that I'd have had to talk to my accountant about bankruptcy the following week, I was giddy with the suddenness of the change. My landlord backed off, and I started work. After two days I was out of debt and back in business.

Three months of the summer were spent on contract, working long hours and discovering the arts of the consultant and business analyst. In the evenings, I went home and wrote a new version of Amnar: Book One. Dan and I had stopped the first series so he could move house. We didn't start again until late September, by which time I was preparing to finish the contract and head to my first games and literary festival as a guest author.

Family issues came up in August, when my mother was admitted to hospital with what turned out to be Crohn's. It brought us back together, although I couldn't go down to visit her as I was only paid when I worked so I didn't want to miss time. We didn't talk until much later in the year, although we did exchange texts while she was in hospital.

October brought more change. I finished my contract in the first week, and on the last day caught a train down to appear at Gamesfest. It was like starting a new life. A week later, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday. Everything happened at whirlwind speed for a time, and then settled down as I worked on the podcast series. At the end of October, I made the last-minute decision to join Nanowrimo.

November was a three-parter. I wrote 50,000 for Nanowrimo in the first nine days, completing another short Amnar book (Nenja), and then took a break for two weeks. I lacked for inspiration to do another 50,000 until the 22nd, when I suddenly started writing again. I actually managed to do another book, more Amnar, by the end of the month, giving me a Nanowrimo total of 100,280 words.

I reached December and as I shifted gears into a new Holosync level, I went through some profound emotional shifts. That probably sounds trite considering the events of the rest of the year. To demonstrate the level of shifting going on, I went down to visit my family (I hadn't been down there for 18 months), and it seems my mother has been in counselling and has abandoned her previous approach to our relationship in favour of treating me like a human being. It made for a great holiday filled with an inordinate amount of glitter glue, and a nephew with a strange and slightly camp interest in pink sunglasses. At the same time, I've been working on a new pitch for Amnar, finally having the help I really need to present it in a comprehensible manner to literary agents.

Once again, I'm in a spell of "the hard", not knowing what's going to happen to me in the next month or so. I'm getting familiar with this level of uncertainty and drastic change (this year has been absolutely packed with it), and I'm even more able to handle it without freaking out or feeling the fear in any profound or destructive manner. There's nothing like going through hard times to make you appreciate how much you've moved on emotionally. It's one of those times when it feels like anything could happen. If there's one thing you can say about this year, it's been eventful. I've faced and overcome one of my key fears (running totally out of money in a profound and perilous manner) and that has made it much easier to function healthily. I'm tempting to write that I'm hoping for a more settled 2009, but I think I'd only complain about being bored. Entering the year by going to a party full of strangers completely alone, with no idea how I'm going to make money this year is one hell of a way to start.

I'm incredibly grateful to people like Dan, Target and Liaison for being the key end-of-the-phone providers of shoulders when I needed help, whether emotional or financial. I'm also grateful to the podcast listeners and people who've been reading this blog. Thank you!

Sometimes, I talk about signs. Or bonks from the Universe that are more like kicks up the butt. Just before Christmas, I had another one. A whole raft of them, all in one go.

Including, most conspicuously, private messages on Twitter to tell me that the Donate button on the Amnar website doesn't work. It made me laugh out loud, in fact. What an obvious demonstration of something I really needed to learn.

The button has now been fixed, so people can donate if they'd like to support me or Amnar. As one friend said, it's nice when a starving artist isn't quite so starving. I've added another button to my blog here. This is the blog to go to if you want to comment and don't want to set up a posterous account.

I used to feel rather principled against the idea of open donations and asking for money. "Why don't you just get a damn job!" I'd tell myself over and over, as though writing these entries and Amnar for years and years didn't actually count as doing anything resembling work worth recompense. This is a sign of my attitudes changing, like my thoughts to myself on the plane on the way home.

I'm vaguely looking for contracts, although nothing will happen until next week, I expect, given that we're in that strange and rather eerie time between Christmas and New Year when the world seems to stand still, holding its breath between celebrations. Having been on the wrong side of destitution before, I can handle the fear of getting pretty close, looking into the very jaws of it, before I jump back, but I'm not going to make myself uncomfortable just for the sake of trying to make money doing one thing rather than another.

In the summer, it was harder, considering that at the time I didn't have anywhere to go if life did decide to fall apart on me. I coped by reminding myself that I'd have to do something, that I would survive; I'd survived everything else, and my body wouldn't stop just because I lost everything. This time, I know I could find refuge with family. Also, I'm still reading Schindler's Ark, and there's something about reading of one of history's moments of pure and unmitigated horror that makes me think no matter how bad my life got, it would always be peaches compared to that.

More on the Ark and its effect on me and my writing in another post.

Meanwhile, I've been afflicted by a persistent nervousness that has robbed me of my appetite completely. I'm honestly not sure where it's coming from, since I don't have much to be urgently worried about right now. It's one of those sourceless emotions that come and go like clouds across the sky, so I'm bearing with it and moving on.

More later, and as ever, thanks for reading.

The view from the Dash-8 was of an endless, undulating plain of grey clouds, pock-marked with darker shadows and touched by gold from the setting sun. I had time to sit and think, since the plane's engines were too loud for an iPod and I'd packed all my books in the hold luggage. There wasn't room for Thomas Keneally's hardback Schindler's Ark in my laptop bag.

I'd had a long conversation with my mother a few evenings earlier. I was still considering it as I stared out at the marbled surface of the clouds. It wasn't like me to feel comfortable discussing writing with her; it turned into a display, an attempt to prove that I could do it, and that it was possible. In fact, there's almost nobody with whom I ever do discuss the fears and doubts that come up around writing.

Then there was that conversation with her. I said I felt an incredible resistance to doing it. In fact, the last two and a half years of personal development, reading, goal-setting, meditating, studying and Holosync was all about dealing with a powerful subconscious resistance. It's hard to describe, and it's not a situation with which I'm familiar.

My mother remarked that I never normally experience these kinds of problems. My life has been spent doing difficult things easily, she said. This is true - although I'm sure I'll sound like I'm boasting. Generally, my life has been characterised by a rapid, instant decision to do something, followed by taking action and success. Writing goal statements, working out my "strengths" and my "life purpose" felt like needless faff when I could get a new contract in a day and never have to interview.

It's a characteristic some people - like my mother - finds disconcerting. Two years ago I moved home, and my mother helped. She harangued and harangued about money, my life, my choices. This was the old version of my mother, of course. At one point, she reduced me to tears in the kitchen and I could only stand there, shaking while she berated me for whatever it was I'd done that she didn't like.

Suddenly, the phone rang. It was an agent about a contract. Tears evaporated in a second and I was doing my patter as though nothing was wrong.

The problem hasn't been so much limiting beliefs, or lack of confidence. It's some kind of resistance to it actually happening or doing anything that might allow it to happen. It's subconscious, and an instant reaction that can be both extreme and melodramatic. I'm embarrassed to admit it's put me in hospital before, it can be that extreme. I'm not even sure exactly what it is, either. It seems ridiculous to me that the one thing I'm driven to do compulsively - write - is the one thing that some incredibly recalcitrant mental programming is determined to stop me doing.

Two years ago, seeing a counsellor myself, her only recommendation was to "give up", to cave in to whatever was acting up inside me. Over the years, I've tried everything from "just doing it anyway" through "embrace your fear" - if it is fear that's the root of the problem. Frustration worsens it; I'm not used to putting clamps on myself like this, and my inability to identify what this is or why it's been so persistent hasn't made it any easier to handle.

So far, the most effective approach has been to "meet myself where I am", over and over again. My life for the last year or so has been incredibly fraught, not knowing whether I'm going to have money the next month - or even the next week on some occasions. I'd learned to cope by being in a state of constant semi-meditation. Reminding myself to relax, to stay present to the moment, to "now", as a means of being open to what might come up. You never know when things might change.

Staring out of the window of the plane, darkness fell as we flew low over the trees into Bristol airport. I was still thinking all this over, aware that even thinking about it triggers the clenched fist around my heart, the inner screeching "NO!" that has been bothering me so much. I will just have to work around it, I thought, and hope that it fades as I keep on going. One thing I do know is that I'm not giving up.

I have a world first to announce. In fact, I might announce two world firsts. The first world first (just to screw you around with words) is that I won a competition this Christmas. A lameness competition. Yes! I am officially the lamest person (apart from James the Dancing Geek) that Johnny B Truant has ever encountered. I achieved this by having an imaginary world for which I had designed a tax system.

The second first was that for the very first time in my life, I felt rather low leaving my parents'. Normally, there reaches a point where conversations about bowel movements, dietary fibre and allotment politics exhaust me, but this time was different. There's always been an emotional tension as well, something that has always driven me to live as far as away as humanly possible without actually leaving the country.

The last few years have been fraught with explosive battles between my mother and me; ever since I first left for university twelve years ago I've been unable to spend much time there without developing a severe case of bruxism. This time has been different. I've changed, and my mother's changed. I was stunned that she'd been to a counsellor, but it seems to have changed everything; we've even been talking about how difficult I'm finding it emotionally to do the whole publishing thing.

I'll talk about the conversations we had in another entry. Tonight, I felt pulled away to a lonely life in the north as I left. Over the last few days I've thought about dropping everything here and living there instead. Of course, it's ridiculous, and the moment I did it I'd realise it was a mistake. It wasn't until I walked in through the door of my apartment and saw it again that I realised I was in the right place.

There's a lot to catch up on here and elsewhere. I have a great deal to work out in my mind after the last ten days, but at least it seems all the issues with my family have been spontaneously resolved.

No longer coughing, spluttering and snuffling, I'm back. Sort of.

I'm still here!

I have to apologise to everybody who's been asking where I am, or thinking my random appearances on Twitter mean that I'm actually back. I'm back to say that I'm not quite back yet. I'm flying back to Manchester tomorrow afternoon, and then I'll be back. It's like Terminator with a chronic indecision problem.

Christmas Day was wonderful, if you ignore the fact that I was coughing like a seal with terminal bronchitis, and my mother had an attack of Crohn's. It was a very small, quiet occasion, only punctuated by my father taking a trip to see his mother at the hospital. It probably sounds like the worst Christmas ever, but in fact it was quite pleasant, in a very quiet way.

The big day is really today. Christmas is all about the children, and my niece and nephew will be here sometime today to open their presents under the tree and have something of a dinner with us. My brother will also be in evidence, apparently. I'm also finally going to see Granny (possibly against her wishes) before I leave.

There really isn't anything else to report. I've spent most of the last week in bed sleeping off the flu, and only went outside for the first time yesterday. I haven't really had the brains in my head to do any coherent or intelligent blog posts, but I'm sure I'll get back to the three-post average the moment I'm back in Manchester.

If you build it...

One thing I did say I would do was work on developing a Wiki for Amnar. Several people have asked me if I could do a Wiki - an Amnapedia, if you like - so they could explore the world. There's nothing more wonderful than listeners, readers, fans or Amnerds (that's what we used to call Amnar fans), asking for something like that.

Since I aim to please, I've been looking into ways to do it. The Amnar website itself is set up to handle lots of entries, but it doesn't work with the style and swish of a proper wiki. I do have a private Amnapedia, which I use to get complicated ideas out of my head somewhere they can be linked. To give people access to that would be to give away the story. I thought about using the same location to produce another Wiki, but there's a problem with the copyright licence (it just isn't a full copyright licence, which is what I really need).

At this point, I'm not sure what to do. It would be great to get a MediaWiki set up somewhere. My server would be the ideal place to put it, so I might have a chat to Dan about doing it. I'll let you know what happens with that. I think it would be fantastic for you all to be able to look up Amnari terms whenever you want to, rather than having to ask me or just sit in a puddle of mystery and confusion.

If anybody has any brilliant suggestions for dealing with the need for wiki, please let me know. In the meantime, if you have any urgent Amnar-related questions, I can always answer them on the forum.

It's just one of 'those' years. My grandmother (the one who lost a fight with a door) has been admitted to hospital this afternoon. I have the flu. My brother and his partner are in marital strife. But I do have a roaring fire and the children are healthy. This is good.

I think my body has been storing two years of horror up just to lay waste to me the moment I put my feet up. There was a point earlier today when I really couldn't stand up. However, dosed up on echinacea, vitamin C and assorted potions from what might be the best-stocked medicines cabinet outside of an actual hospital, I'm not doing too badly tonight. This is the wonder of what I keep calling detachment, but should be called non-attachment. Mentally I've felt fine through the whole thing, although I could use a bit more sleep.

Flu, however, is only a minor inhibitor in the care of children. I spent yesterday with my niece and nephew. There was a lot of running around, and I played various different roles, including a goal-keeper, a footballer, a nurse, a Table Monster, and an assistant teacher. I was very flattered when my niece, whose six and doesn't quite know how to connect me to the rest of the family yet, asked me specifically to help her in her efforts to conquer the world using an assortment of card, glitter, glue and scissors. My nephew (two years old), has also managed to start constructing his own sentences around me. He produced a candle, and held it up to me. "What's that?" he asked.

"It's a candle," I replied.

"I got a candle," he announced, the first time we've heard him speak anything other than a phrase he's heard from one of us.

Granny is another matter. One or other of my parents visited her twice a day to give her a massage, medication and make sure she could make her dinner. Granny is recalcitrant about all this. When she was admitted to hospital after the Door Incident, she desperately wanted to leave. She's spent the last week begging her forebearing doctor to re-admit her. From the outside, it's impossible to know what's really going on.

Much of the care comes from my dad, her son. They are very much alike, which means it's almost impossible for them to get on. Granny is a tough woman, generally regarded as a bully who likes to get her own way. My father likes to get his own way as well. Both have aggressive personalities, so I imagine his attempts at care rather resemble those Dr Seuss creatures (flu has befuddled my brain so I don't remember who they were) who only walk in opposite directions and when they run into each other, cannot pass. They end up standing there forever, while the world builds roads and bridges around and over them.

I haven't been to see her, because she doesn't like to see people when she's in this state. I've considered gently telling Dad that he'll probably be like this when he's her age (she's 89). Getting old can be horrible, if you approach it as something terrible you can't avoid and will only cause you pain and humiliation. I almost wish she could be more like her brother, my Great-Uncle.

He's 94, the kind of man who always strode across the landscape, conquering all before him with a received English accent, home for tea and scones at 4pm sharp. He's losing his memory, or at least on the brink of some kind of dementia, but it hasn't yet stopped him doing anything.

My mother told me a story about him in the car. He discovered that one of his socks had a hole in it. Recalling that in his youth (the 1910s), there was a shop for buying darning wool in London's Russell Square, he decided to take a trip there to buy some. He took the bus to the train station, and then made the 100 mile or so journey to London Euston, only to find that the shop had, in the intervening eighty years or so, disappeared. Since it wasn't there any longer, Great-Uncle went to the British Museum instead, pottered around London, and then went home. I have no idea what happened to the sock.

I told my mother that this rather put her mother's wanderings to shame. When I was a teenager (about 14 or so), I was involved in the care of my mother's mother, my grandma. She had dementia, and spent a long time living with my aunt in a little village in the west midlands. She often wandered off, and we'd get calls from the lady who ran the shop down the road to say "Hello there, your mum's just gone past. Would you like me to round her up?"

Aging and dying are therefore things with which I'm very familiar. Most conversation this Christmas seems to revolve around bowels, bowel movements, and crumbling bones.

Meanwhile, I had hoped that I'd get time to sit down and wrap my head around the work I need to do for Girl Pie to further The Cause of Amnar. I'm half-tempted to get to work tonight, but I'm worried I'll wear myself out. I'm aware that I've been procrastinating - if having the flu can be accurately called procrastination - because in some ways this is deeply intimidating and throws up lots of new fears. However, it's also fantastic for the very same reason. The scary challenge is always worth digging my teeth into.

Anyway, while I muse over that, I shall wish you a Merry/Happy (delete as appropriate) [insert holiday festival of your choice here] or just Merry Christmas, while I snuffle over this roaring fire in my parents' living room and read my Book For Grouchy Atheists To Be Grouchy About (I'll write a review later).

Last week I decided to start a tradition. I was going to call it "mush", because that's usually how my head feels on a Sunday, but instead "stuff" seemed more appropriate.

This has been a week of massive change. Well, that's actually not a grand announcement. It would be revolutionary if my life stayed the same for more than a fortnight at a time. I had a feeling at the beginning of the week that an ending was here, and it duly arrived.

Serendipitous serendipities

Often, it's the worst things in life that lead to the greatest turn-arounds. Posting that I had received a rejection and had no real forward steps to take Amnar to publication led to connecting with the Girl Pie, who has been pushing me with her incredible talent and energy for whipping up brilliant copy. Suddenly, the whole operation is injected with new energy.

I have some work to do for her, which so far I haven't been able to do. Since I arrived down here to stay with my parents for Christmas, it's been a constant stream of visits, carol-singing sessions, shopping sessions, and babysitting my brother's children for the day. I haven't had time to really sit down and really put my mind to what needs to be done.

Everything's different here

I've already mentioned the bust-up I had with my mother. It's another of those serendipitous events that has, in the end, brought about some really strong, positive change. After the fight itself, we didn't talk for months; it was only her developing Crohn's disease that brought us back into contact.

I was nervous about coming down. For the days before the flight I was full of mental chatter as I argued back and forth with my mother over my right to live my life my way. As soon as I arrived I could tell things were different. I'm different, for a start. I've been through a year where everything has constantly changed so suddenly that I've been on my toes the whole time. Growing up emotionally very quickly, recovering from a great deal of different issues rapidly, being broke, being rich, being broke, being rich. Falling in love, falling out of love. It's all happened in one year.

Sitting in the car yesterday evening on the way back from my brother's house, I was stunned to hear my mother talk about seeing a counsellor. Suddenly, I understood why everything felt different. I didn't feel defensive; there was nothing to defend against. My mother had obviously talked through much of her issues with the counsellor, and I was very glad of that. We're naturally starting to build up a properly adult relationship. She doesn't need me to be any particular way to be happy; I don't need her to change her attitude to me.

Taking a bit of a break

After a very long year, in which I experienced intense love, intense poverty, intense wealth, being powerful, powerless, and my first public appearance as an author, I'm dying for a rest. I've switched off from the internet for a little bit - although I'm missing Twitter and all the things that go on. It's nice to spend time doing other things. I need time for some rest and relaxation before I plunge back into the adventure next year.

Sorry that this entry is so short and badly written. I'll come back soon and write something better when I'm not recovering from a long day doing other things!

The ladle

"Where the hell is my ladle?"

This was at 4pm yesterday afternoon. In a sudden fit of spontaneous domestication, I had the (on balance) not entirely clever idea of doing some last minute cleaning before I left to catch my plane. I hadn't quite managed to solve the problem of my fridge, which is trying to make up for the fact that the ice caps are melting in polar regions. I'm sure I've seen penguins waddling up and down in there. On the other hand, the dishwasher had cleaned all my plates and cutlery.

And left all the water in the bottom of the washer itself. I should have been leaving for the airport. Instead, I was opening drawers at random, talking to myself. The instructions for the dishwasher recommended using a ladle to remove the water before clearing the blockage. Therefore, I was hunting for a ladle.

"I'm sure I have a ladle," I said to the assembled kitchen utensils. Admittedly, I don't have much use for it, but still, I knew I had a ladle. I couldn't imagine why it wouldn't be hanging with all my other largely unused utensils on the rack above the hob. Where else could it be.

Then I remembered.

The bathroom.

Yes, the bathroom. Anybody who has ever used Lush products, will know that they make bubble bars that you hold under the tap. If you just hold them, they crumble and collapse, leaving large lumps in the water. My cunning solution was to put the bubble bar in a ladle while it was under the tap. This explains, therefore, why the ladle was in the bathroom.

The next ten minutes were spent ladling dishwater from the dishwasher into a jug, which was then poured into the sink. All I could think at the time was, "Wow, this is going to make for great blogging material!" which is a sign I think too hard about blogging.

The pleasures of airport security

There's nothing like going through airport security to test your sense of detachment and peaceful Buddhisty outlook. It now takes longer to get through security than it does to complete the actual flight. Yet, it's so strangely irrelevant.

Walking past the first set of officials, we must either abandon all liquids or put them in plastic bags. I'm not sure what the plastic bag does, but they're given out in abundance. Once you've queued for half an hour so you can strip down and unload your life into a small tray to be x-rayed by another official asleep at his desk, you walk on through the corridor to the departures lounge, where you can replace all your liquids from the Starbucks and Costa Coffees that fill the place.

Last time I travelled, I went through the special human xray and it beeped. I had to take off boots and hat. They checked me and discovered it was my metal hair clip. They asked me to take it out. They had confiscated emery boards and tweezers from people who might be planning to forcibly manicure the pilot for extremist reasons. However, when I removed my seven inch long hair clip with serated blade edge (it was made and bought in China), nobody batted an eyelid. Nobody had specified hair accessories as potentially dangerous, so it was allowed, despite the fact that it might well have doubled as a deadly weapon.

Going through security now is a bizarre dance of sublime and ridiculous. All I can say is, I'm glad I wear thong underwear.

Seven hours intensive creative workout

Forget the brain gym. Spend five to seven hours with a lively, intelligent six year old girl and a two year old boy with a bad cold. You also have to make sure that you haven't had direct access to a child within the last eighteen months. It's been incredible, fascinating, and exhausting. My niece is incredibly intelligent. She doesn't know me at all, so she's been even more curious about me.

She's amazing, this girl. She came up with the idea of using glue and glitter to make patterns on our plain Christmas baubles. She found an old Christmas tree stand that had cut out stars on it, which she used as templates. She asked me to teach her the word 'template'. By herself she squeezed glue into the template and made loads of new sparkling baubles. I taught her how to count to ten in French. It was intense, watching this girl staring into my face as she picked up the words. She also learnt the word 'resolve' during a game with Lego.

She has a priceless talent for good lines. She played a nurse, treating Rudolf the Rednose Reindeer with a huge spoon and bottle. She described this to me by saying "I had a spoon and a big bottle with medicine in. Before that, it had beer in it."

Since I'm very rarely able to get down here, she doesn't know who I am. At one point, I turned to my father and asked him something, calling him 'Dad'.

"Wow, is he your dad?" she asked. "Like he's my daddy's dad?"

"Yes, I'm your daddy's sister," I answered.

"Are you twins?" she asked.

I've never had so much fun with somebody like this. We walked around the house 'dramatically', managed to spread glitter over ourselves, the table and the carpet, and told each other stories in Lego. It's a good thing to spend a day being a child.

This might be keeping myself entertained before I fly out. So you get deluged with posts, now I'm all packed, showered and ready to go.

I've been working with the thoroughly brilliant Girl Pie to build a pitch for Amnar that works. Doing this has brought up a lot of beliefs, as well as radically altering my mindset. What was seemingly impossible and almost mysterious to me is suddenly doable, something I can think my way into. I also get the limiting beliefs coming up, which is good. They're more identifiable at this point.

This one is the oddest yet. I suddenly thought that it would be finished. It would be concretised. I couldn't go back and edit anymore. The final version would be done. To some people that might seem like a wonderful thing, and it is, but I'm a great one for going back and editing. Or rather, tweaking. Final submission has always been an issue with me.

I go back over the books and tweak for fun, for the pleasure of re-experiencing what I went through the first time. I "see" Amnar, as though I'm actually there when I'm writing. It's like reliving something, and no matter how awful the scene might be, there's something magical in going back to Amnar again.

Just over a year ago, I was finishing up a contract and had nothing to do all day. I used to sit and read through an old draft of Amnar Book One, editing as I went. At one point I looked up in shock at the man who sat opposite me.

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed. "Nasja's been arrested!"

"What?" he asked. "But... you wrote it! You know he was arrested!"

"Yes... but, OH MY GOD!"

Maybe another reason I've always had a secret reluctance to really be a published author was because I didn't want to face losing that magic. I'm fine to have a trusted professional go over and say "Let's tweak here, and let's change this," because the essence of what I see remains. I suppose I was frightened that what is an essentially magical and mystical process might somehow wither.

I don't think it has to be that way; in fact, I don't think it will be that way. When I saw the first draft of the pitch I could see that my mystical experience could very easily be turned into a product that publishers could understand. None of what I'd really done was lost, nothing essential was sacrificed. That's what gives me confidence now.