I was elated on Tuesday when Commences was finally published.  By Thursday I was dragging around in a state of Total Failure and lay in the dark fighting myself and the demons reminding me how little I've managed to achieve.  I can't stand myself when I'm miserable and since a good night's sleep is generally quite cheering (new dawn, new day, more energy to start again), escaping into dreamland becomes vital.  So it's ironic that it's the one time I can't escape.  Smothering oneself with a pillow doesn't work either.  
Perhaps the elation had worn off.  Perhaps it was a downer after a ferocious cup of coffee in the morning.  Or perhaps the demons just like to pounce when one is feeling happier.  Fortunately Friday dawn bright and cold and sunny, the first clear morning in weeks.  The grey murk that has hung immobile and rainless over London for the last two months has become very trying.  The demons retreated and I fixed up Commences' cover and republished (oh, the joy of electronic publishing - no one notices how many times you upload yet another corrected edition.)  
But the demons haven't gone away.  They tell me I have no talent, that I should have given up years ago, that the world is full of younger, brighter, clearer-headed writers who understand this world and write about it with amazing confidence and win prizes in their twenties.  And then the same demons tell me how luckless I am because there are horrendously talentless writers out there who write reams of appalling garbage and yet are unbelievably popular and rich and just as successful as those with talent.  So I'm not without talent but neither am I brilliant.  That shouldn't make as large a failure as I am.
I have to presume, then, that it has nothing to do with talent.  What is it then?

Time to start hunting for a book cover.  Again.  Of all the challenges I face as a self-published author with no capital, this remains the most fraught.  I wish I had the bucks to pay someone to do it for me but then there are a lot of things I wish for and I guess I'll just have to go on wishing.  For the moment.  Until then, it's frantic Google searches for a picture with reasonable resolution and obscure enough so that no one will notice that I'm using it.  Or, as is the case for most of my books, just using one of the pictures the cover-creator provides.  And they are REALLY bad.  Unimaginative, dull, inappropriate.....nothing that would catch your eye let alone want to put on the front cover of your masterpiece.  My right shoulder has become pulped with pain after days of formatting and this hunt for a decent picture isn't helping.  Hashtag woe, as one might say.

Was prepared to spend hours staring at a blank, white screen.  Prepared to spend all week struggling with the blurb for Commences.  Blurbs are, famously, harder to write than entire novels, but no blurb can be harder than one for a surreal novel that is completely and utterly impossible to describe.  Since anything would do, I just wrote anything.  And it worked!
Might blog it later this week.....

Stuck indoors, dying for a walk, but have to wait in for the plumber.  Going mad with frustration.  Can't settle.  Lots of odd jobs to do but don't feel like doing any of them.  Restless.  Bored.  Day completely ruined.  Decided to start the Huge Task that is preparing Commences for publication.  It appears my most elusive novel Commences is commencing at last.  But is the world ready for it, I wonder.