So there’s this book idea, right, and I first pitched it in the 1990s but not only couldn’t get anywhere with it, someone else did. They got a book published on precisely the same non-fiction topic and all these years later, I still remember my first thought when I got it: they’ve queered the pitch for everyone else.

Flash forward to now and it’s not as if I’ve sold that book proposal, but I am close. Close enough that all reason and logic says the pitch is done and the contract should be on its way soon. But partly because of previous bruising, partly because an old friend taught me never to assume something is happening until it already has, I am not yet convinced.

But this means that for the first time I can remember, I’m in a rather detailed and protracted limbo. It’s not just waiting to see if this work happens, it is waiting to see if it happens but at the same time I’m already thirty hours into the research and I’m somewhere around 8,000 words into the book. That’s about 10% of what I expect the final count to be, so I’m in deep yet I’m also not.

At risk of jinxing this entire thing just by telling you, the reason I want to talk to you about this while completely neglecting to reveal what it’s all about, is this moment, this extended moment. This is now a real project, and it is not a real project yet, and I’m in this strange moment. All the writing I’ve done so far, all of the pitching, there is no difference between that and the writing I will do for the rest of the book, but it feels completely different because it’s become real.

Or possibly real. Do you know, it’s quite hard to type with crossed fingers?

I remember this from when I first got to write a “Doctor Who” for Big Finish: playtime is over, this is the real world now and people are waiting for you to write. If they ever doubted that you could or if they ever doubted your idea, they’re way beyond that now and there is the total and completely reasonable presumption that you will do it.

And you will. There’s no question about that. Whatever it takes, whether it’s hard or simple, you’re committed and you’re contracted, you will write what you said you will and you will deliver it when you said you would. So far on this book project I’ve been agreeing dates for various stages and then always delivering early, but it’s still that no one is questioning whether I can write this. They shouldn’t. We are now at the stage where it is not an issue of whether I can write, but whether what I’m writing about is worth reading.

But I do question it. That 10% I’ve done so far is easily the most fact-packed thing I have written in the last decade. It is saturated with detail and I do love this — the publisher called it skilfully done, so you tell me why I’m still not convinced this is going to happen — and not only wasn’t it hard, it was fantastic to do. So much of it was stuff I already knew so the job was wallowing in confirming all of that, then so much more involved an interview with a source which turned out to be such a treat. He told me a fact, right, that won’t come in until later in the book, and even then will only take exactly one single sentence to reveal, but it was something I did not know before and I am ecstatic to have found it out.

Yet I’ve hopefully got another 90% of that level of detail ahead of me. Well, around 90%: I went ahead and wrote another short chapter just for myself, just because I had the details, just because it meant if and when this really does go ahead the way I want, I will have something else already done, it will be already underway. Keeping going is easier than starting or restarting.

There is just such a cold-shower difference between writing when you want to sell something and then writing when you have sold it. I say this to you as someone who has been a full-time freelance writer since the 1990s, someone who tends to write and have published around two thirds of a million words per year. But I also say it to you as someone who has wanted to write this book since the 1970s.

Not even since the 1990s. The 1970s. Just about. This is tied tightly to the very reasons I became a writer at all.

Not that there’s ever been a project I didn’t care about. Even if it was something simple or even if it were something I didn’t really have any interest in but you’ve got to pay the mortgage, still I go through a little of all of this concern about it. But then there are just these few certain and very special projects that mean the world. Only to me, of course, I’d be telling you exactly what this one is if I could and if I thought you’d be as into it as I am. But still, it’s this big to me and right now it is this real.

Or it isn’t.

I’ll obviously be relieved when this goes ahead, but to be involved in something I thought of, I pitched, and which means so much to me that right this moment my stomach is in a bit of a knot, it’s wonderful. I hope you have the same thing, and I hope you have it all the time.