I’m not really a cricket fan, you understand, but there really isn’t anything else to call this blog post. My hundredth. And it couldn’t have timed itself better if I’d planned it.

I just typed “The End”.

My lovely absorbing amazing story about Rafe Lancaster’s passion for coffee and for Ned Winter has just come to an end. In the last week I’ve been running across rooftops and fossicking about ventilation shafts in the sub-sub-basement of the Britannic Imperium museum, and it just ended with a very sweet scene in which the Lancaster Luck finally gets its arse into gear and brings my boys together in Rafe’s bedroom.  I am delighted, energised, tired and oddly sad to have finished it. How can we manage to be so many conflicting emotions about writing?  I dunno.

Of course, when I say ‘finished’, what I mean is that I’ve done the first draft.  Now my lovely Crit group and my American betas will crawl all over it and tell me where I have to cut and prune and generally be quite savage to get the text tight and right and hopefully down a few thousand words—because my little 18k novella that I started with has grown somewhat in the telling.

But oh, it’s done. It’s done.

Rejoice and mourn with me, because ten minutes ago, I just typed “The End”.  The saddest and gladdest words in the writer’s lexicon.