I couldn't sleep last night as my back was sore.  Tossing and turning, it seemed that all of me was eventually in agony and when I did get to sleep, I had nightmares.  But finally, before dawn, I dropped off and had the most ridiculously happy dream I've ever had.  It was a bright summery day with strange, magical, yellow flowers everywhere and I was skipping.  Great big skips too that meant I was going really fast.  Fortunately the strange city I was in was very spacious - wide sidewalks, open parklands, broad streets with no traffic (this is beginning to sound paradisical).  I was also swinging my arms while I skipped, in great big forward windmills. And I was singing:  
Oodilly doodilly oodilly ay/Oodilly doodilly day/Oodilly doodilly oodilly ay/Oodilly doodilly yay
And so it went.
Obviously I can't write the tune down because I don't know how but I've still got it in my head. I hope I never lose it.  With bad news belching forth from the radio in a constant stream, the problems of my life apparently vast and insurmountable, it's nice to have experienced something so utterly silly and wonderful and joyous, even if it was so brief.  Twenty seconds into this moment of silly, wonderful, joyous freedom, the goddamn alarm clock went off.

It’s a cold, wet, wintry day in March – just how I like it.  I can work in this weather and it means when I go out for a walk, the air will be fresh.  And I like hiding in a woolly hat and stomping about in big boots.  I'm on page 76 of my handwritten novel (there are over 200 pages) though I have stopped typing for the day as my fingers no longer seem attached to my brain.....coordination seems to conk after a while.  But the novel no longer seems utterly awful.  I mean, it is utterly awful, but I can already see the second draft – I am mentally rewriting as I go along.  At least half the novel will be trashed and virtually everything will be overhauled:  style, content, emotion, judgements.  Hiding within these 200 pages of bitter drivel is quite a sharp novel.  It has all the potential of being funny, weird and entertaining.  So there is hope.
As a writer, you just have to keep going.  And scrub mould off the ceiling when it all becomes impossible.  And then hide in writing again when the real world hurls such agonising pain at you that you can’t breathe. 
This is how it goes.  I think it’s called life.

​A supernatural element glanced through the buds on the trees and granted me an hour of relief from the demons.  Having returned my Kindle Fire at the Collect store (it broke, much to my horror, though a replacement was sent in an astonishing 24 hours), I took myself to Costa for a monthly flat white and the least sugary goodie to eat (ginger biscuits).  Turned out I had enough points for it all to be free!  Sitting in the window, I rocked with laughter at various Times articles (Giles Coren, Spreadshit Phil), then noticed the Costa music centre was playing “Beautiful Day” which I hadn’t really appreciated before.  Yes, it is, I mused, admiring the spindly new trees planted on the dusty concrete desert that is my, erm, high street/tiny lane.  And then I noticed that I was bopping to “Respect Yourself” which struck me as a fine message after weeks of listening to my “you are a total fucking failure” demons.  Clearly the St John’s Wort is working.  Or the caffeine rush.  On the other hand, it really is time I stepped out of this self-pity wallow.  It’s ghastly.  I hate it.  But often there is nothing to grab onto to get myself out of it.  I’m tired of telling myself how awful a writer I am.  I’m not brilliant, I know, but there are quite a few so-called writers who are WAY worse than I am.  And anyway, do I have to be the best?  Isn’t it enough that I’ve published six books?  Shouldn’t the knowledge that I’m getting better with each one sustain me?  Once, twenty years ago (um, actually I think it’s more) I promised myself that with every attempt I made at writing something, it would be – at the very least – better than the last thing I wrote.  So I may not be terribly talented and perhaps I don’t understand the selling market very well (nor do I want to) but I do know how to mutter the best clichés to myself:  “This above all – to think own self be true.”
The other one is “that way madness lies” (keeping to the Shakespearian cliché theme) and so it does if I try to Think Like Everyone Else.  I can’t.  I won't.  What is the point if one does.  There is already so much pointlessness.  I wouldn't want to add to it.  
After all, though this be madness, [] there is method in’t.

I've begun typing in my handwritten novel and for the first few days found myself feeling really gloomy.  The typing itself is more boring than you can possibly imagine and I presumed that this was because, well, typing long documents IS just boring.  But then I began to wonder if it wasn't the novel itself.  
It's awful.  I had finished it thinking how full of passion it was, how spectacular that this entire work had just poured from me onto the page, how excited I had been when writing it, experiencing floods of emotion, living through its highs and lows.  Heh.  I might have felt passion and high emotion but it sure doesn't come out on the page.  It's dull, uneventful, and worse:  full of every single beginner-writer's mistakes you spend your life trying to avoid.
It tells, it doesn't show.  There are so few descriptions that you can't get a sense of the city, which is the whole idea.  You don't get a sense of the people.  And you don't care.  It's emotionally manipulative rather than evocative.  I had been so sure I was doing "stream of consciousness" writing but in fact, it's nothing like that at all.  It's just drivel.
I have to keep reminding myself that this is a first draft.  It was written fast.  It was written without editing (as it's handwritten) with the intent of editing it later.  But still.  I had vaguely hoped that there was something special here.  Now it seems I'm going to spend a year hacking away at a shit novel, trying to make it shine. 
I can't find a title for it either, though it hardly seems to matter now.  It will have "Jacaranda" in it somewhere.  Jumping Jacarandas.  Hahaha (sigh)(gloom).