I love it when it rains on a Bank Holiday Monday.  I'm probably the only person in England to feel this way, definitely the only person in London!  After months and months of hot, sticky, sweaty streets, with trees dying on every corner because it never rains, the last week has been blissful with enough rain to form puddles and the air a lot fresher than it has been for a while.  It's still sticky, though, but cool enough to occasionally consider a cardigan.  This morning on Russell Square, it felt like autumn:  the ground was littered with dead leaves, the earth was wet, the trees were dark.  But it's a false autumn - the leaves are only dead because of severe dehydration during the awful summer and I was soaked with sweat under my raincoat.  
My life continues to feel disordered and impossible after the crashing realisation that my novel was a disaster.  I'm feeling my way through the days, unable to make any plans.  But, vaguely, once the school term has started, I want to spend a while doing some proper research.  And then I'm going to get going on the second draft - the real problems only start in chapter 11 or 12 and I'm hoping by then that I would have had some inspirational thoughts.  If not, I'll go and find some trees.  Preferably ones that drip rainwater.  

Why do all the joggers jog anti-clockwise around Russell Square?  I always walk clockwise which means when I go for an amble under the (dying) trees, I get loads of sweaty people bearing down on me.  For some reason it feels "right" to walk clockwise - anti-clockwise is like going the wrong way.  Or perhaps it's just me - always walking against the flow, always the one that has to be unintentionally different, never in accord with my fellow man.  
Despite the ghastly heat of summer, it feels faintly autumnal on Russell Square, but that's only because there are so many dead leaves on the ground.  It doesn't rain in London, whatever the tourists might tell you.  Occasionally we get a bit of armpit sweat drizzling sickly out the sky and there's quite a lot of sticky grey cloud hanging about but mostly it's dry dry dry.  The one day it rained this summer - that'll be the day that everyone remembers, convinced it rained every day.  It doesn't.  I live here.  I know.  There's a tiny new cherry blossom tree that flowered beautifully in the spring that is sadly dead, still hanging onto its dried up leaves as if for comfort.  I told one of the gardeners (surely the most pathetic gardeners in the whole of London, given the sorry state of the square) to water the poor tree, on the extremely rare occasion that I actually saw a hosepipe on.  Oh, he said, he'd forgotten about that one.  Yes, quite, and now it is dead.
A.L. Kennedy said it much better than I can on Radio 4 this morning.  Start in at 55 minutes for someone who truly understands the horror of August in London:  ~  http://bbc.in/1NF7H5R

Every aspect of the universe seems to be torturing me.  There are two enormous drills going in the flat downstairs as they attempt to break into the bowels of hell, but the kind of drills where they never stop, so it's not like drilling a hole in the wall to put up a shelf;  it's holding a drill to the floor and keeping it there for hours on end until everyone within earshot has gone completely and utterly fucking mad.
So why don't I get out the flat and run away?  Because I've been sick for two days and my knees are like rubber and I have all the strength of a bulldozed kitten.  Also, it's about a zillion degrees outside which means that my local squares will be jam-packed with half naked flesh and fuckwits playing football and shouting a lot.  So, literally, nowhere to go.
It's been a week since I decided to take a break from my novel, a week in which the truth has, so to speak, dawned on me:  the novel isn't working.  It's garbage.  I've wasted eight months of this year on this thing, the novel that was going to Make My Name and Win Prizes.  It was the novel that I was dying to write, that was going to be an Expression Of My True Self.  Except that it's pointless, tedious, dull, empty, full of plot holes, has no romantic tension, isn't sexy enough, isn't exciting enough, brushes by Great Topics without saying anything new, and has so many constraints that it's pretty much only about air.  
The hero's character is so underdeveloped he's only marginally more interesting than a mark on the wall.  I've been so terrified of turning him into a stereotype that he's ended up with no character at all.
Virtually nothing happens except grass growing which, the last time I looked, isn't very interesting.
The Deep and Meaningful topics I wanted to discuss have wandered off and getting on with life without me.
Everyone else is doing the same thing only about a hundred trillion times better.
What have I done?  How could I think I was a writer?  The fact that I don't sell any books is surely an indicator.  My writing sucks.  I'm not a writer at all.  How the fuck did I ever kid myself that I was?
When the drillers hit hell, perhaps I should jump in.

At the start of the week, I could almost see the light at the end of the tunnel - I couldn't actually SEE the light, but I was aware that I was IN the tunnel.  The end of my novel was no longer a vague, distant thing that seemed utterly unreachable:  it was real.  And yesterday, at last, I saw that light.  The end is suddenly approaching.  Unbelievably, I'm not that far off from The Big Reveal.  Having struggled all week with a particularly difficult bit, I reached the end of it and made an instinctive decision to take a break.  I knew at some point I was going to have to go back to the beginning and correct all the errors, plot deviations and missing research - I can't possibly get to the end with these things hanging over me.  This is not how I write.  But the strength of the story pulled me on and I didn't stop until I knew I had reached a good point - and now I have.
I have a list of errors to sort out, often words that are incorrect or just not viable.  But there are also much bigger elements:  I haven't done enough research on herbal lore and really need to sit down and work that out properly rather than occasional desperate dips into Professor Google's cache.  
A much funnier error is that I've got my castle layout wrong - I actually sat down and drew the damn thing and then forgot all about it!  There's an entire tower missing!
But far more important is that the second main character is not developed enough.  He doesn't leap off the page and it's utterly vital that he does, otherwise nothing the heroine does will make sense.  I've had this problem before with Very Important Characters - I once wrote an entire novel where I couldn't get inside the main character's head, mostly because he was too close to me.  But once I did get his "voice" he turned into the best character I've ever developed.  So I've got some work to do and I need to get it done before that Big Reveal.
Oh, but what fun it will be!  I LOVE editing!  I love taking the work I've already written and making it BETTER!  This is when my writing starts to shine ...
But need a bit of a break from it so that I when I start that edit, I'll be panting to get going.  
Wonder what I should do in the meantime ... 

Why do people associate Bloomsbury with writers?  Because no one can do any writing here now.  The noise is intolerable.  Several floors down, workmen are tearing out a flat - all the bathroom units, the kitchen, the walls and no doubt the floor down to the core of the earth.  They are POUNDING with huge giant POUNDING machines.  They are drilling.  They are banging.  There's not just one of them but several, all working in unison.  It sounds as if they are pounding inside my head.  No amount of loud music is going to block them out - I can even feel the floor vibrate under my feet.  And anyway, I can't listen to music and write.  The best I can do is rain as white noise, a whole variety of which I've listened to on YouTube.  
On top of the pounding fuckers downstairs, the council "gardeners" have also turned up with their leaf blowers - what fucking leaves are they blowing?!  It's August!  It's been the hottest, stickiest, shittest summer in London for years.  Not only are the leaf blowers going but the lawnmowers, attacking the three foot wide piece of debris-strewn weed-infested dirt they call grass.
How am I supposed to work when it sounds like the world is falling down around me?  Everything else in my life at the moment sucks big time (she said, being frightfully slangy) and my writing is about the only thing I can turn to for relief.  But I can't write with all that POUNDING going on.
I bet Virginia Woolf didn't have these problems when she lived in Bloomsbury.

Today I kill the one I love.  I've been edging towards it all week and thought it would happen on Friday ... then yesterday ... but it seems it will be today, the first Sunday in August.  I'm surprised to find how reluctant I am to go through with it.  It's a death that lies at the very heart of the novel.  In fact, it's at very the core of the plot - if it doesn't happen, then everything that happened before is meaningless and there can be no satisfying ending.  I'm not considering NOT killing the character - it has to happen - it's just that it fills me with some kind of horror.  It's not that I haven't killed characters before.  The death count in my novels is very high indeed and I've killed off favourite characters many times.  I've even killed off a main character and ensured that there was no way he could come back - not a trace of usable DNA was left so that even cloning was out of the question.  That was VERY hard indeed as it was a character I adored (even though he was evil)(probably because he was evil!) but I wrote it without a second thought.
I think what has happened in my current novel is that I'm am starting to echo my heroine's emotions.  She's spent most of the novel been relatively muted or sensible or unperturbed.  Part of the novel's plot is that her emotions begin to manifest more and more strongly.  In the last week, she's been extremely tearful and/or depressed, furiously abandoned, painfully alone, with no one at all to talk to about anything ... all just like me.  Because these events were already planned, I have to presume my heroine is not a reflection of me but the other way around - and if I'm to experience what she is experiencing, then what is it going to be like when the horror of the murder arrives?
I was worried at one point that I wasn't getting inside the head of this novel ... I think that's sorted then ... !