Now the initial madness has gone.

It's been over a week now since I put up my second novel on Amazon. It is this which I hope will be the most popular since it took the longest to write, and is my favourite.

  I spent the previous weeks agonising as to whether I should go with  traditional publishers, waiting weeks and sometimes months between responses, and never at all from some of them. Then finally in a flurry of energy I put them on Amazon. I didn't really expect overnight success and in fact didn't really know what to expect at all.

  But one overwhelming feeling seems to have lodged itself firmly in my mind: is that it?

  Of course I'll keep plugging away at it; finding new ways of reaching people and perhaps I'll even sell some more copies. However, I've begun to see a pattern emerging. It was the same as when I was writing all these novels that litter my hard drive, several dozen floppy discs, and considerable floor space in reams of now yellowing paper.  The pattern is: well that's it. Time to begin again. The euphoria I feel is in writing, it reaches a crescendo as I approach the end and for a few days after the story is finished, lying smugly on my screen, I feel terrific. Then withdrawal sets in.

  The only thing is, I like this cold turkey. I wish I earned enough just so that I could go through it all the time. I'm a writer. I like the physical act of writing.

  Yes, a Porsche would be nice. I remember all the years I drove (someone else's) down the Croisette in Cannes when I used to live in France. It's amazing how many things one can "accidentally" find to do when the film festival is on, requiring me to drive down the longest, widest bikini-engorged road in the south of France fifteen times a day.

   The only thing is, there wouldn't be much room for one in my writing room in wet west London with no bikinis in under a thousand miles. And being over fifty,  I just can't pull it off any more.

   And my daughter would want to drive it. I would, too the moment the next leap millennium  begins.