​I’ve just been to see Star Wars!  It took some doing – the cinemas closest to me in Bloomsbury were gradually dropping it from their menu which meant the longer I left it, I was either going to miss it or have to travel miles to see it.  Today, at last, was just the right day to see it though I had to hobble really fast through the hideously dirty, wet streets of London to get to Leicester Square.  Definitely NOT my favourite part of the city.  To think I used to go to that area virtually every week to see a movie.  But that was the old days when I still went to movies, when people didn’t talk all the way through because they thought they were on their lounge sofa and weren’t checking their fucking phones every twenty seconds because they are so goddamn important and someone else so goddamn important might send them a message about something really goddamn important.  So, really, the reason I don’t go to cinemas any more is because of goddamn people.  They really do suck.  I ended up in a teeny tiny Odeon Studios cinema (five seats wide – there are matchboxes bigger than this) but BY GOLLY it was great!  The SOUND – you forget how good the sound is when you only ever watch movies on your prehistoric, not wide-screen, not flat-screen, not HD, not twenty foot across TV. 
Utterly loved the movie.  It took the heart of Episodes 4, 5 & 6 and energised it with modern filmmaking to turn it into something really brilliant.  As the ending approached, I began to feel frantic – how long do I have to wait for the next one?!  I haven’t felt this excited about a movie for years, I think perhaps because it rekindled that sheer wonder when A New Hope came out (although, really, does anyone call it that?  Because I had to go and Google it to find the name – I still think of it as “the first Star Wars movie.”  This discounts the prequels entirely.)
When I came out, London had turned into Bladerunner:  neon reflected in the wet sidewalks, drizzle, crowded sidewalks, sirens everywhere (have you noticed that the sirens are starting to sound like the sirens in sci-fi movies?) – I almost expected the little green man to say walk now, walk now, walk now.  And I did.  I forgot to limp for at least three blocks.

​The New Edit has begun.  Nearly twenty pages of dense notes (I wrote that it was eight pages – some sort of typo, I think.  Perhaps I meant eighteen and they have now expanded to twenty) form the backbone of the novel.  At last my book has a spine.  I can feel the body of the work leaning on it heavily but as spines go, it’s strong, rather like the character himself (though he doesn’t know it.)  Doing a new edit through his eyes is like seeing the story afresh.  With a strong foundation, my writing feels stronger too.  I know where I’m going and it’s only taken me a year to get there (that sentence was written with heavy irony.)  The rest of the world seems to have disappeared.  Checking emails and social media – the bane of every writer – are no longer distractions because I don’t bloody care.  Problems that come my way are being handled with relative ease because they aren’t the core of my life.  I feel like a writer again.  I feel elated.  I’ve got wings and I’m flying.