It's been lurking outside my window for months. I wake up every morning to find it there, peering in at me with its 10 million pairs of eyes.

Today I thought it might have left. No such luck. I don't think it's going away.

It offers me things. Fresh produce. Donner kebabs. Chicken sandwiches that have corn in them. CORN! It sends delivery people to my door with packages, and pigeons to my balcony with, well, the things pigeons have. Mostly feathers.

I confess, at times it lures me out. Last week it tempted me into six different pubs. I had to lock myself in the flat this week  to avoid its charms.

It tries very hard to take me to shops that sell fetishwear. Shiny latex corsets, thigh high boots, stockings, garters, and long gloves. Oh my! But so far I've managed to get away before it could take me into those places. I suspect I'd never make it back into the flat once that happened.

I don't know how much longer I can resist. Send help.

SEND HELP!

I sent uncorrected proofs of the Red Phone Box manuscript to all the writers last night.  My part in the writing and editing is now finished. Tim Dedopulos will now do the ebook formatting and also print and proofread the text on paper. As one does.

So tired, but it's been amazing. A much different experience than working on a book alone.

I'll be sending review copies out next week, if everything goes as planned. And then I'll start working on the Cthulhu Lives anthology. (And finishing my own novel.)

I really am trying to blog more regularly. The book is eating my face. I just finished most of the revisions on the last story-chapter. Because of the  way the ending has changed, I now need to add a small section. Then it'll be read again, quickly, by a couple of people, and the whole thing will get a paper and pen proofread. The final, FINAL stage.

In my wildest imaginings, I never thought I'd be doing revisions at the eleventh hour, but something strange - or not so strange - has happened. I refuse to let any part of the book not live up to its potential. It feels like I've been climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and I've been struggling upward for months, maybe (or in this case, two years) and I'm really near the top. Just too tired, too worn away, as though time has eroded me back to almost nothing, Do I stop? Do I despair? Do I say, 'Good enough, and sit down as if It is finished?

NO. I'd rather die than give up. I need the ultimate goal. I need the finish line. I need to capture the rainbow. Or whatever is fucking* up there on the top. So I've been working on it, non-stop, late into the night. Deadline looming. I can't even sleep properly. I wake up thinking about it  early in the morning, eyes full of sand.  (*Oops. I swore. This is a very sweary book, written by (among others) Brits and Aussies and people from New Jersey where the word 'fuck' is considered the equivalent of a comma. You need to be prepared.)

I think I finally understand what it takes to write long pieces of fiction.

It's terrifying in a way, to have poured so much of myself into this project. It's almost ready to meet the eyes of strangers. This morning Jill Tracy tweeted, and Meredith Yayanos retweeted, this quote by writer Charlie Kaufman:

"Do not simplify. Do not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure."

It came at the right moment, like a little omen telling me it was okay to do this, this very difficult thing. I think the book is solid and gorgeous and atypical. I hope. I believe. All the people who wrote parts of the book carried me when I needed them to. All the people who put money into this project helped push it forward. I don't intend to let them down now.

I risk failure, but I also risk success.

The process of writing and editing a book is obviously a long one. In the case of a book that I write all by myself, I can at least feel that any delays are mine to resolve. In the case of a book written by a small army of friends and acquaintances, I I sometimes just have to wait.

The book has been with a few beta readers for the past six days and feedback is just coming through now. There aren't actually that many issues, but having waited a week unable to do anything, I feel anxious and ready to move forward.

I'm hard at work on suggested changes, or solving minor issues. I can now do something. which is a lot better than staring at my Inbox willing people to send their feedback.

That's progress, right?

What I've learned is that making a book ready takes longer than I expected. I will allow an additional couple of months from now on, or maybe even four months. Perfection is impossible, but if you want to get close to it, you have to allow for the cruelty of the Time gods.

 I wonder if we have any whisky in the house...

I wanted to write a little about what it's like when you need to promote a book. This book, Red Phone Box, is something I've been working on for two years. But more than that, it's something I've recruited a couple dozen people, friends and strangers, to work on with me. So I want to make sure all our time wasn't wasted.

Though I can't be totally unbiased, I think it's actually quite good. It's not like anything I've looked at before. We've called it 'a story cycle' but it might be more appropriately called a novel-in-stories. What it isn't is an anthology. An anthology is just a collection of short stories. They might share a theme. This book is made up of stories that are more like chapters. None of them will stand on its own. Well, maybe one or two could stand alone, but even those are woven into the fabric of the book as a whole.

So  now it's on the verge of being ready to set free in the world. And I admit I feel like I should be doing more to promote it.  I'm sure other writers feel the same way.

Would anyone like to say anything about what they did the first time they put a book out? This isn't exactly on my own, but I still feel like I have to do the lion's share of the promotion. Any advice from the more experienced people out there. On what they'd do next time or how they dealt with the overwhelmingness of the process?

I'm truly all ears here.

Last night I went to the Brixton Book Jam. It was full of lovely people including some good writers. The list of readers included Jim Pollock and Suw Charman Anderson.

I read from  one of the stories late in the book. It was the first time I've read in public in about four years. It felt good. I remembered that I like it. So I'm going to try to do more of it.

I believe I'm going to have another event to go to soon. I look forward to hearing other people's readings and meeting peopl

Today has been wrap up day for work on Red Phone Box. It's just about complete and edited. Should be totally finished on the publishing end by the end of the weekend, except for the final print and proof.

It seems impossible. It was two years ago, May 28th, when I wrote the first story. Two years doesn't seem that long compared to how much work has gone into it. It feels like five years. Or possibly all eternity.

Well,  all eternity is just about to wrap up.

In the very near future the book will be off to the printers.

If you'd like to get regular updates about the book, you can like its Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/The.Red.Phone.Box. My thinking is that if Facebook is going to collect our information for the NSA, we may as well not give them our information, but use their pages to promote things. Revenge with books.

It's past midnight London time. I'm sitting at my desk in a room full of people, all quietly working at computers. We have a guest staying with us from Prague. He's here on business so he has to prepare a presentation.

I try to make myself think that it's like when Frida Kahlo  had Leon Trotsky staying at her house, but no. It's not. It's nothing like that at all.

We discovered a cool blues pub today. It has the largest selection of single malt whisk)e)y in London and the best barbecue ribs. It's on Edgware Road. Wargrave Arms, I believe it's called. Really good burgers, too.

Red Phone Box is on the very brink of being born. There's only a small amount of work left to do on it. Two pages worth, maybe. Then we'll print and proof it. (A good proofing is always done on paper, so you know it lays out properly and because you'll catch a lot more errors.)

Tomorrow we'll have breakfast out. Having a guest is like being on holiday. Except we still have to work.

I've often thought that a lot more could be done to make good book trailers. I've spent some time recently looking at different examples. There are starting to be some intriguing ones. Mostly they use actors. Some of them are even made up of clips from films based on books.

The problem is that books aren't films. So it strikes me as a bit disingenuous to use film footage to create a book trailer.  But what else can you do?

Well, Ghostwoods Books are willing to experiment with the trailer for Red Phone Box. So this weekend we'll be filming  in London. I have a couple of ideas. They don't involve acting out scenes from the book, but they do involve live humans and a real phone box.

If you want to be part of the book trailer, you can email Ghostwoods Books and get more info. (ghostwoodsbooks at gmail.com)