January was a blur, mostly parenting, discovering that new to us gap between daycare and school starting.
But I managed a little writing, and planning. I finished a workable draft of the next book with Penguin, and Brent has passed over it too, adding some great scenes and tightening, we work very well together and a lot of that comes from trust and I'm loving the shared space (universe) that has made (also, I think the book's very funny). I’m also finishing one novel so I have a clean slate for the next, which is my grant book (which currently consists of a few scenes, notes, and a lengthening reading list of everything from fairy tales, parenting books, to stellar astronomy).
The novel I am nearly done with (well this stage of the doing done) is Fantasy (with a capital F) and feels like a fusion of everything I have learnt in the writing of the previous books. It’s intimate, but big. The writing is less heightened, but it also contains some of my most heightened passages getting the balance right is the trick.
I am quite in love with it, which is a good sign, but I know that I will head to the sick of it stage soon. I don’t think I have ever read and re-read a book so much, which isn’t to say that it is any better than any of my other books, but it does feel the most considered (hopefully in a good way). It’s also my biggest book by a good forty thousand words (and that’s with a lot of cutting and shaping) and I don’t think I’ll write a bigger book than this*, but it has been fun to let it have its space. It’s also doing that thing that some of my books do at this stage where I am beginning to see the shape of stories flowing out of it, and how they might work – it’s an odd kind of echoing that the cavern of a story makes.
The novel that is going to keep me going for the bulk of the year though is the grant book. I’m still grappling with the voice and the incidents of the story and how best they might play out, but as I’ve been thinking about this book for the best part of a decade I think I know the way.
So January has been the joy of collaboration (and seeing the wonderful art Brent sends me of our first book which out in 2025 and which I’ll start sharing as soon as I can), the hyperfocus of a book nearly done, and the thrashing broader strokes required to get a new book working.
This grant, even with the school holidays eating up most of January is already starting to bear fruit. We’ll just have to wait and see how it tastes.
*Though there's definitely an argument that the Nightbound Land duology** which clocks in at around 180,000 words and the Death Works trilogy which comes in around 240,000 are essentially single novels.
**I actually think the Nightbound Land Duology works best as single book, the first half the hesitation before the storm, the second all action. It's a bit unbalanced as two novels, but I really didn't know what I was doing when I wrote those. Some of us learn slower than others.