As is often the way, the project you’re initially more excited about stalls under the pressure of your expectation (and the person you’re working with not having time to work on it with you), and the project you barely talk about for fear of Writer’s Block sneaking up and battering you with a large stick quietly gets underway.

The Collaboration has not halted, it’s merely ticking along far more slowly than at first expected. Ashley has the harder job, from my perspective; getting the words right is a slog but one I feel sure of achieving, but the vision is something else altogether. Of course from his point of view my work is equally unfathomably hard. So we wait on each other for inspiration to strike and the next burst of development to take place. I suspect it might require me cracking the whip (at myself, apart from anything) to get it back on course.

The Grown Up Monster Book, on the other hand, having been left to ferment, is coming up bubbling. Two evenings on the trot of just getting things out on paper have been as productive as any I could have hoped for. Not least in the revelation of a new character who walked her way onto the page I would swear without the slightest prompting on my part. She owns the book right now – let’s see where we go together.

Hopefully the long hike we’ve got planned for this weekend will give everything a chance to churn up (I find that as I walk I clear my head and sort of narrate descriptions to myself mentally. It’s a very good writing-without-the-writing practice for me). Also the extra stone I’m carrying might even start to shift.