It feels fitting that I’ve just typed these words on the winter solstice. There have been so many synchronicities while writing this book – sections dreamed under the magic of supermoons, wild rivermint conversations, endless west-coast syrupy orange sunsets, and of course our vanlife travels last winter down to Crete, and this year through Spain and France. This isn’t a travel book though, it’s speculative fiction/sci-fi, a bit anarcho-feminist, with myriad elements of the natural world encountered making appearances. So, here’s the new draft. 75,000 words.
It’s the strangest thing writing a book. I’ve not been paid for it. I have no publishing contract (although that will hopefully come), it’s just hours, days, weeks, months, and in this case, years of a life funnelled into creating something that might be loved, or panned. You have no control over the outcome. I’ve had to let go of any notions of what success for this work might manifest as, instead just keep on writing: one word, one idea after the other; keep refining the concepts, study every person I know in the minutest detail, keep writing and improving and reading and reading, then writing some more in the hope that somebody somewhere will recognise something in these words, that something in here resonates.
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