You know what the best thing is?

The very bestest thing about being on this course?

No, it’s not sitting around on my arse all day creating worlds and people in my head and secreting them out onto paper through my fingertips (although that’s pretty damn good).

There’s basically two sorts of students. There’s the ones like me who want to force themselves to find time to focus on their writing in a general sense and then there’s those who arrived with the specific intent of writing and finishing a novel or similar project. Unlike me, who turns up to workshop and tutorial going “I’m not too sure what this is supposed to be, but I was trying to invoke a sense of space/abandonment/displacement/etc, etc,” we get to read a narrative being born.

And that’s pretty special.

You get to see the early tentative steps where the voice perhaps isn’t quite distinct and watch it develop into fully grown characters you really care about.

Equally, the worst thing, the very badest thing is that I’m not likely to see the end. To see what happens to these fictional people I’ve invested time into getting to know.

(Well, at least not for some time anyway - and it’d be very different reading them nicely bound in a paperback than on scraps of photocopied pages; kind of like when you meet someone down the pub and they seem really nice and then the next time you run into them it’s at a wedding and they seem… different, somehow.)

This has, only just occurred to me, as we clatter towards the final period of the course and I send out another batch of CVs for jobs I’m over-qualified for but still won’t get an interview. I’ve just realised that I won’t get to see how Angie and Theresa get on in their trip to Greece; whether Juliet finds her Russian anarchist prince charming; whether Pete and Billy survive the long night and, more crucially, the rising sun of morning; what relevance the artic explorer ancestor has to Julia’s marriage and what exactly Simon is going to do to put that union in jeopardy; whether anyone who visits Sanj’s corner shop has a happy ending; just what the hell is going on at the mysterious oxbow lake?

H’mmm. Feeling sentimental when sober. That’s a new one. I’m sure I’ll be back to irate ranting soon. In the meantime I’m off to write about a guy probably not called Nigel and a café on the Norfolk coast where there’s a telephone people ring to report rare bird sightings.