The ('elusive' and 'really big') Next Step

I have been saying for as long as I can remember that I will write a book. It has been a constant (quietly droning but insistent) annoyance to me that no book has so far turned up. It has (remarkably, miraculously or even ridiculously if you prefer) not blunted my enthusiasm for insisting that such a thing is meant to happen.

Lately I have realised that this no-book (a true work of fiction insomuch as it does not exist) and I are more than casually acquainted. This really is not a complicated thing. There is a direct correlation between the absence of a bestseller and the fact of my refusal to actually write anything.

And (I am not being morbid- melodramatic more maybe) my sell by date is drawing inexorably closer. The time approaches when I (if I have a maker) should meet Him. It truly could be any time or day for any one of us. What I dread about this prospect is the thought that I have failed. To be told what I already know- you did not do what you wanted most to do.

The greatest failure is of course the failure to have even tried, which ironically could be at what I have excelled. Any friend of mine will tell you that irony is not lost on me, far from it, it is the language I understand best.

And, like all good and honest things with their ability to speak of many seemingly unrelated things "my book" is a metaphor. For everything you never did and wished it were not so. Let's put that tired old thing to bed, for as the bard himself once said,-

"We are such stuff. As dreams are made on; and our little life. Is rounded with a sleep." End of. Innit.