Hi friends!
(First, some housekeeping. Today I found two of my own newsletters in my spam folder, so it may well be that some of them are going to yours, too. Do check, and add substack to your list of safe senders if necessary. One of the mailouts in question was alerting you to the current sale I’m running, so if you’re tempted to upgrade to a paid subscription, do so now as there’s 30% off until Friday 21st April).
Now. To business…
I hope you’ve forgiven me after my revelation/confession of two weeks ago (take a look here, if you missed it). But the good news is that I made my deadline (cue fanfare, please!) and sent my new book off to my agent on Monday of last week.
It’s certainly one of the key moments in the life of any book, as I’m sure you can imagine. This thing started off as a glimmer, a flicker of an idea, somewhere in the ether. At that time it was so minute — such a tiny, fragile, thread — that I can’t really remember when that happened, though I do remember the idea coalescing a little while I was in Reykjavík for Iceland Noir in November of 2021. It was then that the book began to form itself, I suppose, and the idea started to attract others, and at some point on that trip I made the decision that even though (or perhaps because) it was a very different book to anything I’d written before it was a world I wanted to write about and characters I wanted to develop. But, when I got home I was still knee-deep in writing another book, and so I held off making a start while that was finished (or abandoned, in fact; I realised it was a book written during lockdown and dealing — tangentially at least — with my divorce, neither of which made for a good novel). But then fate intervened once more when another project appeared and demanded to be written RIGHT NOW (a novella which I’m still planning to finish off some day), and so I did that instead.
But all the time, the book I finished last week was percolating, growing both inside my head and in my notebooks, in preparation for the time I’d finally have the head-space necessary to give it the attention it needed. I spent a fair bit of time researching and planning it, then started work in earnest about nine months ago. Since then it has more or less consumed my (work) time, along with this newsletter.