Black Hours Diary no.17: And… breathe…

As of last night, my Facebook status reads: “Matt has completed the Black Hours, and demands booze as his reward” or something like that.
One friend got the wrong end of the stick and wrote: “Boo, hiss, boo” until they worked out it was a different type of boo(sic)ze… (thanks, Glyn).

Anyway, I’m digressing. The point is I’ve completed the third and - near as dammit - final draft of The Black Hours before it goes to my publisher. As Dave Budd said to me this morning, I “seemed to get through it in record time”. Usually that’s the sign of a half-arsed attempt at something – a rush job, and you couldn’t blame me for rushing once I discovered fatherhood was beckoning in April. But, you know, it wasn’t rushed. And it isn’t that short a novel either, about 135,000 words. It just flowed. It did everything I wanted it to, and is everything I wanted it to be.
It simply worked.

Which is great.
And not so great.

Great, because when I send it to Macmillan next week, I’ll be a little confident about it and while I will still worry (hey, I’m a paranoid, human writer – give me a break here!) I won’t be pulling out my hair thinking “will this sink my career?” I’ve said it before, if I’m wrong about The Black Hours, I’ll hold up my hands and start over again. It will be a little knock, but I have two more Secret War books to think about.

But it’s not so great in terms of the diary entries in this blog. Because really there is little more to say on the subject. There is no conflict. There is no tragedy (yet). And I am pretty pleased. I’m more hopeful than I was with The Secret War, and The Hoard of Mhorrer. I think this project will be mercifully short. And hopefully, published.

Mmmmm.

Mmmmm.

What more is there to say on the book?
Well, not a lot more to be fair, until I hear back from Macmillan. I’m off to the Midlands at the weekend where I’ll be teaching pupils at a local school ‘’how I do what I do’, and ‘why I do what I do’. I might even test a couple of pages of The Black Hours on them – see what they think.
Kids are the shrewdest critics you’ll find, so if they think it sucks, I should get a good idea what Macmillan think!

So until then… Where’s my booze?!!