Suddenly my novel is flying - I don't mean I'm writing more quickly (no hope of that) but the action has picked up so much that it's almost frightening.  For months and months it's crawled along, atmosphere building and building but not a lot happening.  Last week I found myself writing the part I think of as "Temptations" and this week I'm building up for the "Descent" - already!  All those slow months have vanished - it's almost going too fast.  "I'm already at Descent?"  I found myself thinking yesterday.  How did that happen?  Didn't I just start this novel?  
Isn't it odd how time contracts and expands and does whatever it feels like, just never follows a clock or a calendar.  From too slow to too fast - from crawling non-action to a violent plunge into the future ...
It's all rather exciting and a welcome relief from the general awfulness of my day job which has recently begun to feel quite utterly unrewarding.  I had to take a break from writing yesterday (work, chores and exhaustion all clamoured to be attended to) and it felt like a year before I could sit down again this morning and begin shaping the final paragraphs before the Act II climax hits me (and my heroine).
This is one of those rare highs of writing and I'm going to take it and RUN!

The Road of Trials is done and I've reached the Fourth Confluence!  I've managed to negotiate my way through the most plotless part of my novel and am now approaching the wildly exciting part......but not until I've gone through the lovely romantic (i.e. very sexy) part.  This doesn't mean that the writing is any easier but I'm used to that now.  After a while, you take it for granted that every sentence has to be squeezed out of a dry rock.  Writing with this degree of difficulty does at least mean that I don't waste a lot of words.  Every sentence is fought for so every word drips with meaning.  
I've taken a week off from my real job, the last week I can get any decent amount of work done this summer because once the school holidays arrive, my concentration is going to terminated.  I find it very difficult to write when I'm not entirely alone, living most of the day inside my head without any outside contact.  It's the best way for me to write and these days the opportunity comes around rarely, hence the leave-taking during term-time.  I will still have my early weekend morning writing sessions (when the resident teenager is still sleeping) but it's going to be a long six weeks.  My reward at the end will be another week of leave!
The day couldn't have been more perfect for writing:  the first rain in Bloomsbury since about February, a dark sky (I had to turn my desk lamp on to see my keyboard) and lots of romance to write about.  It's been a while since I've written any romance and it does make one feel quite benign.  Even managed a walk on Russell Square without being fried to death by the sun or flattened by a tourist.  In the last few weeks they've been multiplying at an exponential rate, like a virus.  They act like viruses too, infesting every blade of (burnt, brown) grass, talking shit very loudly and peering at their stupid tiny screens instead of the things they paid their squandered Euros to see.
Roll on autumn.