Thursday 24 January 2019

Fresh start, new book

It's been a difficult couple of months. My father-in-law died in December and we organised his funeral. It was a privilege to arrange another creative's funeral, his coffin was decorated with some of his favourite cartoon characters. He drew some of them for a dozen years for children's comics in this country. I left a pile of pens on top of the coffin, people wrote messages of love and farewell, coloured in the drawings, even drew their own. A strange but lovely moment of remembrance and celebration. 

Meanwhile, I've been working on A Shroud of Leaves, trying to get the new edit to the same standard as A Baby's Bones and keep it in the same style. Not easy, I think writing evolves and moves on, it makes writing a series more complicated. It's getting there, but it;s been much harder work than I expected. My editor has had to work very hard too! I hope the next book I have to edit won't be so much work (for either me or an editor). 

It feels like a proper book now. I like the cover, it's got a similar creepiness to the other one without giving too much away. I imagined a brick house in the book though so I've changed it to stone in the text!


After running a novel in a  year course, I'm now working on an course looking at editing (very timely), at Barnstaple library. It should be fun, and great to be working on a few books that were written in that year.