“There is a great deal more pain than pleasure in writing fiction. It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going. When I read the proofs of a new novel—which is the last time I will read or even glance at it—I approach it with one eye closed, so to speak, thinking, God, what am I going to find here? And I find horrors, horrors that can’t be fixed. Everything in the text now seems hopelessly flat and deadened. Where I imagined a dancing rhythm, I find clumping and stumbling.”
John Banville
In my own case, I consider myself fortunate if I hear the chime maybe once every three or four weeks (sometimes months); but it does happen, I think. Or is it just a bout of tinnitus?
My catalogue to-date comprises:
Short Stories
The young Woman who fell from the sky (published)
Journeys into the void (work-in-progress)
Novels
The Frailest Leaves (completed)
The Winter of our Discontent (completed)
Out! Out! Brief Candle! (completed)
In Search of an Ending (completed)
A question of Innocence (work-in-progress)
Novellas
A Pocketful of Mumbles 