Behind the Scenes

This month has been a one of editing — although perhaps not quite in the way you might imagine. Some of it happened at home. Some happened in those odd pockets of time squeezed between my day job and everything else life throws at me. And quite a bit happened while travelling back from ten days in Italy, where again I found odd pockets of time, usually in the time after saying good night to my daughter and my own bedtime. In June 2026 I spoke of investing in a Remarkable Pa

July has seen me successfully finish the first draft of the sequel to Finding the Lions! Adding in a scene is tricky, I find, as the story still needs to flow and past experience has taught me that if I stray too it leads to complications and massive rewriting of subsequent chapters. However I'm feeling confident that I essentially wrote what I did before I burnt the notebook by accident. Whilst that was going on I found myself thinking about my previous books particularly

Practically everything we do has some sort of consequence. Sometimes the consequence is amazing, great, fulfilling and makes us feel great. Other times the consequence can mean heart ache, pain, bad feelings or having to redo work. This month I have been dealing with a particularly terminal consequence, burning a notebook as fuel thinking that I had typed it up! Leading up to that point, I was super excited, having converted my handwritten notes to text on my Remarkable p

There’s something unsettling, yet addictively exciting about wanting something you’re not supposed to… I’m nearing the end of the first draft of the follow-on to Finding the Lions, and this story has taken me somewhere deeper than I expected and introduced a new point of view, Illena, adding to those from Dameria and Karik. This last section is seeing the characters cross the Kazakhstan desert, somewhere I have little knowledge about having never been there; the internet is a