I'm so happy to say that Astral Travel, my latest novel, which was postponed due to the coronavirus lockdown, is now scheduled for publication in the autumn, and yesterday went off to the printer's. This novel, unlike some - I wrote Too Many Magpies in six weeks - had a long gestation: I wrote several drafts over several years alongside a load of other stuff. No draft ever took me very long, but each one was never right, and the final version, which I did write in a white heat, turned out pretty different from the rest, but you could say that the basic idea was a long time developing. So although it was frustrating when lockdown put a break on it just as we were gearing up for publication, it seemed almost like part of the process!
I just have to pull myself out of my state of literary stasis now. Since, like many writers, I couldn't write, and even found reading quite hard, I've spent lockdown in a practical matters, turning this attic room into something useable. (It was worse than this when I started, with huge holes in the plaster, and it's not quite finished yet, papered but not painted, so I don't have proper before and after pics.)
