Unexpected Pleasures & Towers of Words

My publishers’ website has been updated. As a result of which, Greenwood Tree is now available to pre-order. All very swish, with a drop-down menu.

It’s rather taken me by surprise. A pleasant surprise, I hasten to add; something of  confirmation that, after all the hectic scribbling and manic editing, the doodling and digressing (on my part), the planning and preparation, we are on the way to publication. Still, unexpected, and slightly unreal (and all those other oft-quoted sentiments that authors are supposed to express).

It certainly took a damnably long time to write. I have made up for it since. A sequel is in progress,in that I have a beginning, a middle and an end and have only to fill in all the bits in between, I have a third half-planned, and ideas for a fourth jotted down somewhere …This on top of all the ideas, images, plot lines, notes and ‘excerpts’ lying in files and folders,  or in notebooks and on scraps of paper, as yet untyped. Some of those may yet disintegrate, fade away or otherwise be consigned to oblivion. Others I hope will grow into something, well, at least entertaining,  if nothing else.

… Silver buckles on cracked black shoes twinkling along 18th century cobbles; a hedgehog in slippers reading the Times, clockwork automata in hot-air balloons, (these are only a few of my favourite things….) Into my head it pops, onto the page it goes. It might become a short story, an incident, a scene, a three-part saga; I squirrel them away for future use – throwing nothing away. Yet. I accumulate. Something of a hazard when it is physical; and even  slightly disconcerting in digital form. Rather like a despairing partner or parent when their loved one insists on throwing nothing away: ‘But are you ever going to use it?’ asks my common sense, ‘You never know,’ replies my imagination,  ‘you just never know when you might need it’ and ‘waste not, want not,’ and so it goes on. Towers of words, piling one on top of the other, regardless of whether or not there is space and time and energy to do something with them, sitting in silence, watching, waiting for their cue…which does not come. Because there is always more spilling out, being tucked away in nooks and crannies until space itself will eventually run amok, shouting out ‘No More Room! No More Room! Implode! Implode! Melt-down!’

So when both my mental attic and my digital one are filled fit to burst, and bookshelves are swelling and heaving with notebooks stuffed with words, and I am reduced to a jelly or puddle on the floor, perhaps then all those words, sentences, ideas will find a way to float out into the ether and paint pictures in other people’s minds.

(Turns to gaze woefully at groaning pile of notebooks; then turns back to keyboard to type. Tap, tap, tap. Taptaptaptaptaptaptap….)

All of which was intended to lead neatly onto a link to said swish drop-down pre-order  menu … (I can’t think what happened along the way):  Grey Cells Press  (where you will also find excellent works by fellow authors, and likewise here :  Holland House Books ).

Happy browsing. 🙂