​The Big Reveal at the end of my novel is not going well.  Four chapters in and I’ve ground to a halt.  Keep writing, I commanded myself.  Get to the end of the first draft of this part before you start thinking about changing it – once it’s written, it can be polished a thousand times until it’s brilliant.  Even diamonds were rough and ugly once.  But despite my excellent advice, I sank into a dull, grey despair yesterday, matching the dull, grey clouds that refused to shift.  This morning I woke up in the dead hours and couldn’t get back to sleep – not the best way to start a Sunday.  But you’ve been stuck before, my daughter said to me, you’ll get out of it.  What is hard to explain is that when it doesn’t go well with one part of a novel, you feel as if the entire thing has collapsed, that it’s entirely awful, that you’ve wasted a year, that you’re only worthy of cleaning other people’s toilets.  I’ve never struggled as much with a novel as with this one, which leads me to believe it must be truly terrible.  What am I doing?  Why am I doing this?  Why am I torturing myself?  Why don’t I change my name to Pollyanna Putitabout and write porn?  It’s what sells, after all.  (Or, since initials are so popular now, how about P.A. Putitabout.)
I’m going to have to dump the four chapters and start again.  I have to change the style, the voice, the story itself, the names, the back history, the motivations and the methods of torture.  I have to change the name of God.  I have to change the world.
It really is just too much to ask.

I'm freezing cold.  I don't think I've been warm once in the last two days.  My dismal council flat doesn't warm up at all, even with the heating turned to "snow" (that temperature on the boiler gauge that comes somewhere after 50 degrees) but then my flat is never warm.  Except in summer.  Was it really summer for eight months last year?  A distant memory.  I usually love winter.  It's the only time London feels clean and the ghastly pall of pollution lifts slightly so that you can breathe.  For a while it seemed we weren't going to get winter at all - while half the country was being washed away in floods, London was brightly entering spring.  Daffodils came up in November and the magnolia tree on Tavistock Square had its blooms out in January.  But jolly January has been followed by freezing February and I'm even considering wearing pyjamas to bed.  I can't sleep in clothes.  It's just weird.  But waking up several times in the night with the fleshiest part of my arms feeling like frozen meant (urk) has made me wish for something like a, well, a t-shirt would probably do it.  
Coincedentally, my novel has entered winter too.  Life imitating art?  

I am on the last chapter before the Big Reveal.  I can't believe I've got this far so quickly!  I thought the second draft would take much longer - I thought the Male Character Edit (as I've come to think of it) would take much longer too.  But suddenly I'm on Chapter 33, a chapter I haven't written before so will be fresh fresh fresh.  It's a short chapter too and then, suddenly, it's the Big Reveal.  All the clichés apply:  but a light at the end of the tunnel is the one that comes to mind most.  I actually feel excited - do people get excited about writing?  It's Sunday but I set my alarm for seven and then woke up at six and waited and waited and waited for it to go off (too cold to actually GET UP and get going.....)(and there was always the hope I'd catch another few winks).  But I'm here.  I'm sitting at my desk.  Trying not to drink coffee as it has been making feel mighty spacey recently.  Promising myself not to spend half an hour scrolling down on all the crap on Facebook.  
​It's a chapter that promises to drip with sadness.