In Dreams Awake

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Tuesday 30 July 2013

Apologies and a New Story

  Well, apologies first of all, because it's been over a month since my last blog. I moved house and found the wifi at my new place was down, so I've been running back and forth to the library to use the PCs there, getting the new novel published and trying to keep up with emails and so on without paying so much that I can't afford biscuits (a disaster, that). So I'm sorry I've been missing, I'll try not to let it happen again.

  The good news is that The Gate of Angels is now published, available on Kindle as an e-book and soon in print via CreateSpace too. This finishes the Songs of Sorrow duology, picking up where Blood and Gold left off and taking the story to its conclusion. It's a story I needed to tell, I think. Religion was a large factor in ancient societies, so it's hard for a Fantasy author to ignore the subject. My problem was that I kept returning to a sort of quasi-Christian belief system - one God, one Heaven and so on - even in stories that didn't need it.

  So I decided to deal with that by writing a story that was all about such a belief system. I hoped doing so would scratch my itch, if you like, and mean the theme would stop worming its way into other things; which it has, now. I don't know - it's a guess - but I think a lot of writers probably encounter something like this, a topic that lodges in their mind and won't be shaken loose. People often say they have a story that they need to tell, and maybe this is what they mean. Anyway, it's done, so I hope you enjoy the book.

  I'm now back writing Starfire, which has given me such trouble before, but I think I might have cracked it now (famous last words, eh?). I've shuffled the events around so they're told in a different order, and I've expanded the early sub-plot until it fills almost the whole of volume one. I think it'll work. And wondering about it's half the fun, after all. Probably the story will wriggle about as I write it, wanting to take a different shape to the one I had in mind... and that's good, it shows the tale has some life in it, and isn't just a cardboard pastiche.

  That's it for now. I just hope when I do the next blog, I'm not muttering about how Starfire doesn't want to be written.

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