Happy Author

I wrote the words "The End" today, out in my little writing cabin (actually I wrote my name and the date) on page 306 of the leather-covered book in which I've been writing Anansi Boys. (Although I did 102 pages in another notebook when I was in Ireland.) Which doesn't mean the book is done -- more that, if this were a patchwork quilt, I've now cut out all the squares. Now I have to sew it all together -- there's around 42,000 words still untyped which now need to be typed and moved around and changed and polished and thrown away. But I know the shape of it, and I know it all ends on a beach, and with a song, and I know what happens in Basil Finnegan's meat cellar, and where Fat Charlie got the lime from. So that's all right.

And then I drove home, to discover my missing luggage had been unexpectedly found and delivered, so I now have my leather jacket, not to mention many pairs of socks. Then I cooked a duck for New Year's Eve dinner, and while cooking it I suddenly decided to make a tamarind-sour-cherry-cider sauce to go with it, which, slightly to my surprise, worked perfectly. So really, the old year has ended remarkably well.

(I hope yours did too. )

It'll be a full January -- I've got the rewrite on Death to finish for New Line, then typing and fixing Anansi Boys, and then the Sundance Film Festival [the Mirrormask info is now up -- go to http://festival.sundance.org/2005/filmguide/ , search for Mirrormask, then click on more]. [Here's the little still they've got up at Sundance:]




I know it's bad form to repeat yourself, but I was about to list all the things I hope for the readers of this blog in 2005, and I realised I'd already written it back in 2001, when I said...

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

And I really still do.