The final iteration of the Stone Road is coming out late April with US paperback edition. I am so delighted that it has managed an Australian paperback, a US hardcover, audio, and now the US paperback like its sibling Day Boy.
The book is slowly sliding into the rearview, and I’m getting deeper into a new work, my grant book which is about as ambitious and vulnerable as I have ever been in fiction.
New books are perilous endeavours because they kind of feel like nothing at the beginning, and then you start throwing words at them and more words and more words and they seem like they will never be more than a mess. But Stone Road felt like that too, and Day Boy, and every other novel I have published. It’s a little reassuring.
Also reassuring is the work I’m doing editing another novel project. It’s all holding together and while there’s still plenty of clunk, there’s less clunk than when I’ve started, and a bit of poetry, I think.
Finally, the pages keep coming on the project Brent and I are working on. What a joy it is to see a story grow into pieces of art. This book is going to be really special – not least because it’s a dream made real. And once again it all started as words on a page about which there was never any certainty that they would make sense (I just got to share that doubt with someone else from the first draft on).
Things I'm reading:
I recently finished Robert Jackson Bennett's excellent The Tainted Cup. A fantastic big picture (but also sort of intimate drawing room) crime fantasy novel that I'm still thinking about*. There are giant monsters, an Empire struggling with corruption, and a great crime-solving duo that get compared to Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but Robert is doing his own thing. Can't wait for the next one.
*Mostly how did he get that to work, because it does, brilliantly.