Hopefully, you have noticed that things on the blogging front have been a bit quiet for the last three months. If you haven’t, hello. So what caused radio silence for a quarter of a year?

Was I kidnapped by aliens? Was I held against my will and forced to knit a tartan scarf? That hardy perennial for all unexplained absences: working on an oil rig? Perhaps I was banged up with Norman Stanley Fletcher?

Maybe I’d been lost in my copy of The Satanic Verses and lost all track of time. No. None of the above. However, that would be the perfect tenuous link to some advice that Salman Rushdie once gave me about writing a book, as I was photographing him. Which is yet another tenuous hook.

Rushdie’s sage-like guidance for creating my tome, my masterpiece, my magnum opus was thus: “Write so much it’s too much effort to go back and change it.” Advice I have taken. All 86,352 words’ worth. Thus, The Time Dustmen was born.

Working to the timeline of the literary steamroller and creative factory, Stephen King, who advises that a first draft should be completed within three months, I did just that. Eight hours a day, three to four days a week. I knuckled down and wrote and wrote. And then wrote some more.

While it was not as hard as I thought it would be, it did suck up all of my free time and most of my brain as Jack Russel, Anthony Degu, Major-General Sir Andrew Charles Norman Taylor, Lieutenant Commander Reginald Nicholson Brown, Shithouse Doors, Billy Bullshit, and 13 SCS Artisan Musketeers lived in my head.

Somehow, I created a whole universe in my imagination and then committed it to the page: a world of my own making, the plot and characters of a multi-thread time travel novel.

I admit that I fell in love with some of my creations, such was the force of their personalities, that for a while, they actually seemed to live real lives. Killing one of the characters hurt. And no matter how loathsome, I made a pair called the “Unscrupulous Bastards,” I could not stop loving them.

And then, almost by surprise, as by this point the story and characters seemed to have free will and were in the driving seat of the plot, the first draft was finished.

Yes, I was elated, I’d finished my first work of fiction, who would not be proud (apparently only three per cent of those who ever start a book actually finish it), and this is my second. But a few days later, I felt numb.

So, for about two weeks now, I have been in a vacuum, wanting to write but feeling like I’m being unfaithful. That, in some way, I’m betraying the completely fictitious universe that once lived in my head.

Apparently, some writers experience something akin to grief when they finish a novel; perhaps it’s that. But I don’t think so. I want to write, so here I am again, writing about not being able to write. Perhaps that will free up the creative pipes. I fear the pressure is building.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that last week I had to serve my first mistress, photography, and shoot a family event, thus my compulsion to create was subjugated for a while. But writing is an addiction, and I know I must hit the bottle at some point.

So if I go off the radar once more, perhaps I’m writing another book. Either that or I have been kidnapped by aliens. Careful with that probe, mate!