Do Not Approach This Man. He Has Just Finished Writing A Novel, And May Be Dangerous.
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I have finished writing Jude: Level 2. Thus the depraved and hideous face you see above, exhausted from months of writing and rewriting. (Twenty drafts of the toughest sections... though of course by the last few drafts you're just tweaking, or - to use the more accurate technical term favoured by the serious novelist - disappearing up your own hole). Exhausted, in particular, from the final weeks of staying up till 5am every night, with no days off or weekends. By the end I wasn't entirely sure what year it was. (1987, by the look of the shirt and stubble.) I look like a released prisoner, bewildered by his freedom. Which is appropriate, because I am.
With three days to go, I developed stigmata. The skin on the backs of my hands began to break down as I wrote. I was quite pleased when I noticed. Oh you know you've given it everything, by God, when you develop stigmata in the final furlong. You haven't cheated the book by selfishly holding anything in reserve, for yourself, or those you love, or the future.
In fact I finished on Oscar night, but I've been too knackered to post until now. When I finally, finally, finally finished, at 5.30am, and hit send, and it vanished from my screen in a swirling stream of zeros and ones down the phonelines to my agent and my publisher, I ran out into the street and danced and sang and sprinted through the melting slush.
If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Berlin is the city that doesn't have to get up in the morning (because it doesn't have a job), so there's always something on. And so I ran, singing, around the corner to the Babylon Kino, where they were still screening the Oscars, live from LA - nine timezones away - on the big screen. I arrived in the middle of Kate Winslet's acceptance speech, stayed till the end, and talked to friends afterwards. There was a great buzz in the cinema, as the crew for Spielzeugland / Toyland were there, and it had won an Oscar for Best Short Film earlier in the evening, to mighty cheers and screams. So, between them snaffling an Oscar and me finishing my book, there was a bunch of very happy people jumping up and down on the pavement on Rosa-Luxemberg Strasse at 6.30am, as the birds on the roof of the People's Theatre across the road cleared their throats and thought about singing.
Spent the last few days recovering, and dealing with the backlog of a life that has been on hold for months. Visited the doctor with my stigmata (they are beginning to heal). Today was the best day yet, I had a brilliant plan and I carried it out: I stayed in bed all day, dozing, reading, drinking coffee, and eating chocolate.
So, now, back to work. Radio play. Screenplay. Poetry. Life.