In the notes at the end of The Girl with Glass Feet, I wrote that writing is like going underwater.  I still hold that to be true, and until two months ago I was swimming around on the ocean bottom, deeply immersed in the final draft of my new novel.  It’s finished now, completed at the start of April, and it’s taken me most of those two months to  journey back to the surface world.

The completion of a novel is a strange moment, made even stranger by our age of word processors and computer screens.  You save the file and close it just as you’ve done every night.  You shut down the computer.  It all feels exactly as it has done every night since you started.  This time, however, you won’t be opening the file again.  Oh, sure, there’ll be an edit to undertake with the publisher, but that’s further down the line.  The story is finished.  You get up and shuffle away from the computer and you crack open a beer or pour yourself a glass of whatever’s your tipple.  Time to start catching up with the real world, to get on with all those things you’ve left undone while you’ve lost yourself in the final changes.  Problem is, so much of yourself is still down there near the seabed, rising with slow strokes towards where you’re supposed to be now.  It takes a couple of months for that part of you to splash out of the water and reconnect with the rest.

I’m at about that stage now, and am already casting my eyes back towards the water.  I can see the shadows of something else swimming down there, something I’m more and more eager every day to dive after.

This is all very cryptic, I know.  I haven’t told you anything about the new book, but it’s still slightly too early to do so.  What I do want to start talking about here, is the writing process of the next one.  In the past I’ve used this blog to talk about monsters and fairy tales and stop motion movies, but I’m conscious I’ve talked very little about actual writing.  I thought it might be fun to fire in smaller updates more frequently about what I’m doing and how I’m working.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll tell you about the new book soon, I promise.  For now, all I’ll say is this: there are more than a few trees in it.