So, I’ve decided to write a novel.

Actually, I decided long ago I was going to write a novel, and in fact a few years back I did produce a manuscript. 90,000 words. It took me nearly three years to write. I sweated over each and every sentence.

It was rubbish.

Well, that’s being a little bit unfair. But it did have major, MAJOR problems. Despite spending years of my life scorning books that had silly plot devices, huge info dumps (especially from the baddie at the end) and characters that pop in and out of the story simply to drive the narrative, my book… my child… made exactly the same mistakes.

Fortunately this was pointed out to me and the book was consigned to the bottom drawer, to moulder and rot away forever. (Actually, I still adore the idea so I might re-write it and actually do the relevant research this time).

Anyway, with a few pro short stories under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time to have another stab at the world of noveldom. I’d like this project to take a little less than three years, but to be honest, I aint going to rush myself.

I’m not planning the novel out. I know what it’s about. I have a begining, I sort of have a middle, I don’t have an end. I’m going to do one of those wanky things and see where the characters take me. (Or, to be more precise, where my subconscious takes me). I’m quite prepared to kill members of the cast, if that’s what needed. Sort of Vivien Leigh in Psycho.

I tried this once before, got 30,000 words into the piece and realised, too my horror, that I’d written myself into a hole. The ghost of Raymond Chandler whispered something about ending the next chapter with a guy holding a gun. But it didn’t work. The book was still-born. The characters never to reach their final destiny.

This book will hopefully have a future.

I really, really want to finish it. Even if it does end up in the bottom of drawer.

So over the next year or so I’ll keep you abreast of what happens.

And you never know, perhaps one day you’ll walk into a bookstore, buy a book by a totally different author, and think to yourself, I wonder what happened to that Ian Mond guy…?