Finding the joy

Today, having put it off all day, I sat down to write. And stood up an hour and half and two thousand words later. The story, the need of the characters to get from A to B (Prague to Crete, actually) dragged me in as it used to do. After ten weeks (blimey, has it really been that long!?!) I am finding the words again. I've managed to put down eight thousand odd words in eleven days - not exactly my usual output and it feels slow, but it's coming.


This week was all about results. Once the tests are in, the  surgery done, then all the extracted tissues go up to a lab to be tested and analysed and explored. The best possible news would be that there was a clear margin of healthy cells, no other organs were affected, and it hasn't spread to the lymph glands. We didn't get the best news. As the week went on, the results were slowly shared with us and a plan evolved for radiotherapy, a year of hormone treatment and still, our bubbly oncologist predicts, a reasonable chance of a cure. We didn't brood. Something much more immediate came up that we could deal with. Our fifteen year old tortoiseshell, rule-the-world cat Harry Wooggo aka Bumface had developed a small soft lump under the skin on her chest. Yesterday, she had it removed at the cost of three hundred quid and is now bumbling about with various bald patches, a plastic collar which she is just refusing to see and hopefully, her cancer removed. We refused to have pathology - we wouldn't put her through the treatments my husband is facing at her advanced age, and anyway, she's spectacularly healthy as she is. As, interestingly, is he. I have faith in them both.


It's strange how real life pushes back the impact of the book etc. Yet the need to write is a force that has me mumbling dialogue under my breath and poetry spilling onto envelopes if I don't sit down and get on with it. Writing is how I cope with life. The life of the book out there in the world - doesn't seem as real, now. I wish it well, but my priority is its little brothers, book 2 and 3. There I still have a creative input.