What's stopping you?

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
~ Gene Fowler

This morning, my first ever royalty cheque in the mail. Imagine that. All that fun and someone sends you money as well. Only they seem to have left off a nought.
This afternoon, I'm up to one of my favourite parts of the process: the printing out of a final manuscript onto actual paper with actual ink to be read - at which point the story takes on an entirely different aspect and things appear which were not at all obvious and the mind plays tricks and scribbles ensue... and in the case of this particular manuscript, it's about the eighth time I've got to this point and it is, I trust, almost unrecognisable. But it's still a marvellous moment.

Spring seems to have suddenly sprung, too, at long bloody last, so I can sit in the sun and read the damn book - with much coffee, after a five-hour country drive back to town very very early this morning. Once the sun rose there were small lambs and clouds of cherry blossom and mountainous rhododendrons. This country is just so ridiculously green everywhere. You'd think I'd be used to it after three years but I just stare stupidly out the window saying perceptive things like "Look at all that grass." It's not like that where I come from.