Four months of snatched hours, temporal wizardly and plate-juggling - and I'm done.

Something that followed Orbital 2008 as a random on-line whim is now 116k of completed manuscript - one last rub-down with the belt-sander and cue One Giant Reality Check... of one form or another.

Even if it does get accepted, then I face the bizarre realisation that something that's been in my head twenty years doesn't belong to me any more - it belongs to editors, to agents, to marketeers, to critics... and to the public.

The shift from 'writing for myself' to 'writing for potential publication' has been a hurdle in itself - accompanied by a sudden snake-like rear of my professional industry awareness: like a hydra, I found myself with two heads. It was no longer something to haphazardly amuse myself and my Twitter friends, something I was writing  to show my son (when he's old enough to care!), overnight, it became self-aware. It demanded structure, and marketability; it needed to be critically analysed in every word and sentence. The chance in perspective, the onslaught of self-doubt, were inevitable, but I guess we all go through them.

And the more we face that cold page, the more we realise we can. And that we enjoy it. And that we can't leave it alone. And that it plays on, the interweaving of characters and plot-lines and insights and tableaux, whether we want it to or not.

And that we have...
To keep...
Typing...

(I swear my family are going to kill me).

This moment should be celebratory, but my writer friends have tormented me with enough horror stories about What Comes Next... no starry-eyed illusions for me!

I'm chuffed to have finished - but find myself oddly bereft. I'm twiddling, looking for things to occupy my brain and time - and finding the plot for the second one is already laying itself out, unrolling like a length of multi-coloured ribbon.

The belt-sander is ready and waiting for the weekend.

And so, as they say, it begins...