On the Flat Week After Finishing, Leaving a Draft Alone, and Getting Ready to Sell Books — a writer’s diary entry, 3rd of August

Monday. The heat has not broken and shows no sign of intending to, and I have spent the first proper day of the week doing the thing nobody warns you about, which is being flat after finishing something. I expected a week of feeling marvellous. What I have got instead is a sort of low hum of pointlessness and a strong urge to reorganise the linen cupboard. I did reorganise the linen cupboard. It looks very good and I feel no better.

The draft is in a drawer. Actual drawer, actual paper, because I know myself. If it were only a file I would have opened it eleven times by now and started fiddling with the second chapter, and the second chapter is not the problem, the second chapter is simply the bit I can reach. Three weeks minimum before I look at it. That’s the rule and I made the rule when I was clear-headed for exactly this reason, because the version of me that has just finished a thing cannot be trusted within a mile of it. She thinks it’s brilliant on Monday and unpublishable by Thursday and neither of those women has read it properly.

So I am not writing this week, and it turns out I don’t entirely know what I am if I’m not writing. I walked to the boulangerie at half seven when it was almost bearable. I watered everything twice. I sat with the shutters closed and read somebody else’s novel, which I hadn’t done in weeks, and was cross with it for the first forty pages purely because it wasn’t mine. That passed. It usually does around page fifty.

Saturday is the atelier, so the afternoons have gone on that instead. I counted books into boxes on the kitchen floor and then lost count and started again, twice. Made the little price cards. Found the tablecloth, the good one, the one that doesn’t show what the last event did to it. Six of us going from the writers’ group and we’ve been on the phone about tables and shade and whether anyone owns a gazebo, and the answer, predictably, is that one poet owns a gazebo and will not stop mentioning it.

And underneath all of that, the low dread. I can write a thing in a cool room quite happily. Sitting behind a table in the sun and having a stranger pick up my own book, in front of me, and read the back of it, and put it down again and walk off, is a different order of activity altogether. Somebody once told me you get used to it. She had done about forty of these. I have done four and I do not appear to be getting used to it, and I have decided to stop treating that as a personal failing and just take a flask of something cold.

The moon is thinning out. Past the full and heading for the half, that stage where it comes up late and you see it in the wrong part of the sky and can’t immediately work out what’s wrong with the evening. Nothing to do this week except notice. I have got in the way of thinking every phase requires something of me and it does not. Some weeks you just clock it going round.

Six days until Saturday. Boxes by the door so I don’t forget them, which I would.