The Home Stretch

A subscriber to this page who read my most recent book, Villager, told me, "Good luck topping that." I've been doing my best over the last few months. I can just about see the end now, a few hilltops - or, perhaps more aptly considering the subject matter, spoil heaps - in the distance. The story I’m writing feels new and thrilling - perhaps a bit more new and thrilling than I thought it would feel - and, as it unfurls, my brain bends with it in a good way. It’s set in the 1980s, a time when I thought a lot about aliens and monsters. One thing I remember is I was always more scared of both as the sun was going down. I finish a lot of my writing days a little frightened by this science fictionish monster I’m creating, reviewing it with the combined hissing heads of all the people who have ever said anything vicious about what I write, thinking about its fundamental silliness compared to all the books by proper authors with proper educations and qualifications and posh author friends, and questioning whether all the great stuff I’ve felt about what I’ve been doing is delusion. Then I wake up as early as possible the next morning, impatient for my coffee to brew because I’m so excited to get to my desk and find out what happens next, to play around with my Cold War era bendy straw narrative some more. I suppose this means those sundown feelings can be placed dismissively in the box of ‘Archetypal Irrational Very Tired Writer Thoughts Thought By Very Tired Writers After Writing A Lot Of Words’. If not, does it actually matter? The reason I write books is to feel the thrill of finding an empty space in the universe and making a story live and breathe inside it, and I’m doing that right now and enjoying every minute of it it, even those minutes when I walk around the house going “OH MY GOD MY BRAIN IS BROKEN FROM LIVING TOO INTENSELY AND EMOTIONALLY INSIDE THIS MADNESS.”
As the artist Leonora Carrington said: “You don’t decide to paint. It’s like going to the kitchen to eat. It’s a need, not a choice.” Novel writing should feel no different, and for me it also feels more like painting all the time. But I stand a bit close to the canvas sometimes. I get dizzy. My vision blurs. At moments like that, a good thing to ask is "How would I feel if I lost all this?" If the answer is "utterly devastated" everything is probably going ok. I asked the question of myself the other day and the answer was actually not that; it was “utterly devastated, plus destroyed, and like I’ve had my heart cut out and thrown on a giant chemical fire, alongside some tyres and unused cans of pesticide”. I was two hours from home at the time and realised that I hadn’t backed up that day’s work. My heart pumped hard in my chest, even though it had been one of my less productive mornings, and I thought I heard it say something about burning being the one way it didn’t want to die, plus something about being nice to the planet. I cut my day short, drove home. I suppose I must quite like this book. A lot of it is about the contrasts between childhood and adulthood. As I write it, a fact keeps hitting me: people get old. But another fact keeps hitting me too: all the best buzzes of creating stories - including that very special one where you can see forward to the point where some stupid world you dreamed up will actually exist - never do.
If you'd like to reserve a signed first edition hardback for spring, you can do so here (and read a bit more about what the novel’s about). It will be in all the proper shops and everything when it comes out, of course, but this is the best way to support me, and independent publishing, with a purchase.

(This isn’t the actual cover; it’s just a draft made for the time being by my publishers, until the cover is designed.)