For months I've been dreaming of this - the moment when my two main characters meet and AT LAST they have.  In the seconds before they were to meet, I had to lay down my metaphorical pen and rush off to my real job as I had a staff meeting - what cruel timing!  When I got back, I decided to skip lunch (something I never do as I'm always hungry) and got back to That Moment, despite the fact that I feel cold and damp from the rain (forgot my umbrella) and rather hungry and WAY too high on coffee (again....I really need to give up this poison) ...
And at last they have met.  Across an empty hall, rather than a crowded room, both utterly convinced that the other can't exist when, impossibly, they obviously can.  Phrwww.  Romantic moment of the century.  For me, anyway.  
Nothing quite like being thrilled by your own novel.

Ten chapters down and finally my heroine plunges into the forest towards the forest and the story can begin.  I fear that it's taken far too long to reach this point, that the reader will have ditched the book in frustration before the real story has begun.  But I also think I need a solid foundation for the novel, created in those first ten chapters, to give resonance to the ending.  It's hard to know what to do.  I can't tell how long my "Act II" might be though logic says it should be double the length of Act I, if I was to follow screenplay rules.  Somehow I don't think I've got enough story for 20 chapters.  But these things don't matter much.  A novel takes as many chapters as it needs to tell its story.
There are times when I think writing is a self-indulgence, a luxury, when I should be working my fingers to the bone doing something sensible.  Like working in a real job, in the real world.  Then I remember my my fear of crowds, my fear of small spaces, my fear of small talk, my paranoic uneasiness and my feelings of panic.  Perhaps my writing isn't a luxury, after all, but an act of self-preservation.  I write so that I don't go mad.

What do you do when you get your best idea and you're nowhere NEAR a writing implement?  Memorise it?  The trouble with memorising something perfectly is that you're more liable to forget it perfectly.  On Monday I was trying out a bizarre new cross-trainer at the gym (is there anyone in the universe who doesn't look like a demented monkey when they go on a cross-trainer?!) and I relaxed sufficiently for my mind to wander off and have my two main characters converse with each other, a conversation that only occurs at the end of the novel.
It was word-perfect.  It was concise, beautiful, exactly the sort of writing I want to do.  But it was so perfect that not only did I forget it but I forgot that they had even had this conversation and when I finally remembered to write it down, two days had passed and I couldn't even conjure the core.  These perfect conversations seem to go on inside my head when I'm generally quite removed from the world, like the exact two seconds before I go to sleep.  Recently I managed to have these thoughts while washing the dishes which meant much pulling off of the rubber gloves, dashing to the lounge and frantically scribbling the words down in the exercise book I have just for such (rare) occasions.  
And yet I know when my two main characters finally meet (possibly in the next chapter or the one after.....so quite soon) I'm going to have forgotten all the brilliant things they need to say to each other.  
When I was young and wanted to be a painter, I found I couldn't express the images on my head on paper.  I thought I would be better at expressing myself in words.  But it seems that this is a universal problem with art, no matter it's form:  you can create the most utterly beautiful, brilliant, wonderful, expressive, to-die-for creations in your mind but in the so-called real world, it just dies a death.  What does this say about the real world?

There's nothing like dogged determination to change everything.  I started my six day Easter break by starting my novel all over again - or, at least, starting it with a big fat editing pen.  
This raised an interesting question:  how do you know when to edit?  If things aren't going well, do you just struggle on?  I've never been able to do this.  I feel that previous chapters lay the foundation for the following chapters and if you feel they are weak and bother you, then you should go back and fix them up.  This isn't any kind of final edit - it's just getting that foundation more solid.  
I felt as if my novel had turned into a swamp and was prepared to be rewriting for weeks.  I was immensely surprised (and relieved) to find the first three chapters in excellent shape.  In fact, they were exactly how I wanted the later chapters.  It seemed I had forgotten how I had begun and had wandered off on the swampy paths of cliche.  By Chapter Three, I was hacking at bits I didn't like and inserting the ideas that were meant to be there, including new ideas.  For example, I have a problem with the word "magic":  I didn't want to use this word.  I'm not writing about magic, my heroine isn't a witch, she doesn't cast spells.  But there is an "otherness" in this novel that I seemed to be describing with increasing clumsiness.  So I gave in and used the magic word and instead of making it corny, it's actually given the story focus.  
By the time I reached the weak and woolly chapter seven, I was hacking merrily.  My ideas were very focused, the story had much more clarity and I wasn't wasting time with meaningless paragraphs.  
My writing is starting to feel freer.
I had planned to take off three writing days when I go back to work tomorrow, but I've changed my shifts and will continue in the morning.  At last I'll be able to start chapter eight.  Act 1 is drawing thrillingly towards its climax.

This new novel is starting to feel like torture.  I lay awake half the night last night, agonising over the first seven chapters.  I was due to pick up my edit of a very poor chapter seven today after a three day break from writing - a break which has given me time to see the novel, as it is so far, in the proverbial new light.  
Last week, I was riding high.  Words were spilling on the page.  Progress was being made.  I was beginning to have "moments" in which I was lost in the fictional world, when I'd look up from my computer and be amazed that I was sitting in the corner of my shabby council flat lounge.  My confidence soared.  And then, last Friday, I read chapter 7 before going on so that I could pick up the next chapter in the right place.  I was horrified to find it dull, lumpen, full of cliches and just bad bad bad.  Numbly, I began a rewrite to iron out the most superficial problems.  I was halfway by Sunday and had to leave it as planned for three days.  And during those three days, a thousand tiny niggling little problems began to, well, niggle, until there I was last night, desperate for sleep but unable to find it, with my thundering heart and my screaming RLS, caffiene, chocolate and lack of exercise all exacting their punishment, the ghastly spectre of my writing haunting me.
I had so looked forward to writing this novel.  It's been three years since I got the idea for the story, three years in which I went to great lengths to get ready to write it, knowing that I needed to start fresh with no other novels hanging over me - hence the push to get my older novels published, to get myself established, to feel settled in my day job etc etc.  I wanted to escape into this novel.  I wanted to feel the joy of writing again, writing something BIG.
Instead, it's turning into a nightmare.  I seem to have forgotten how to string words together.  I've dropped into a style of writing in this novel I don't like and can't shake.  And worse, it's going to take ten chapters before the story gets interesting.  That's ten chapters of godawful boringness in which I try to build a foundation for the story.  Which leads me to think that the story isn't that good, after all.  There isn't enough plot to keep me occupied.  There isn't enough movement.  There's no modern world so it has become that thing I hate most of all:  really corny fantasy.  The thing of beauty I wanted to create - after so many years of creating horror and insanity - is turning into a dirge of dullness.
It seems you can't make beauty interesting.  Only madness and "gritty reality" is interesting.  
So in this, I have failed.  I have reached chapter seven and my novel is dust.  As an exercise of torture, it doesn't get much worse in the world of a writer.  Do I give up?  Do I start again?  Do I continue despite the foundation of the novel drowning in a sad swamp?  What do I do?  All I feel is pain and disappointment at myself while all around me people write exactly what other people want to read.  How did I never manage to get that right?