Somehow seven months have slipped by since I last updated this blog. That’s time for an entire season of NFL blogging, multiple edits of the new book and typeset checks so I guess I had better get things back on track with this blog and quickly, because whilst I may have been quiet on here, things have been anything but quiet for me.

So, where am I now?

I have come out of the post NFL relax week or two that usually follows the end of the Super Bowl and what I think of as my NFL blogging season. The NFL blog has been a great platform to learn when I can write, gives me structured thing to practise developing content and getting writing reps in, and gives me an excuse to watch a lot of American Football. I also thoroughly enjoy my weekly chats with Dan for the podcast, which also helps me form ideas for the blog and help give it structure, and this season get NFL trivia questions wrong. For those of you who were listening you will have got a sneak preview of the title of the new book.

I have already started to outline how I might tweak things for next season, but there’s plenty of time to think about that.

Whilst the season was going on, we’ve put in place the plan for the sequel to A Ghost Called Dog got everything sorted out with the relevant publishing companies and I’ve been hard at it. Mostly I have been focussed on turning the new book into the best piece of work I can. We have used the same editor, Karen Holmes, who edited Ghost but the new book is setting up something bigger and more complex so the draft I started from needed a fair bit of work and it took a couple of passes to turn that draft into a manuscript that works the way I intended

You always learn from your mistakes and there are several things I can take away from this process that will hopefully serve to improve the next book’s development. I say improve as I believe it is a common folly for all writers to start their next book full of confidence that they have learnt so much and there will be no problems with this one. Yeah right…

Still, I am determined to improve things both in terms of planning, plotting, and my initial editing process. I think I’ll always need to write my way through problems and questions, but hopefully I can weed out the excess that readers don’t need to see before putting the next manuscript in front of an editor. I might need a better laser printer for that.

I did at least avoid the whole difficult second album problem because my life did not change radically after the release of Ghost, and although it was my first published book, Ghost was in fact the third book I had written.

Currently, I am trying to get the typeset finished. My latest batch of amends has gone back to the publisher, and I’m confident once those changes have been made that the text will be set. We will still need to check the layout to find out what if anything has drifted and if we need to move any text around pages, but we are getting close. I am excited about how the illustration for the cover has turned out and as we have the dimensions of the spine sorted I don’t think it will be too long before the full cover starts to takes shape.

I’ll keep you updated on how things are going, and I have a couple of other tweaks and changes that I’ve been thinking about for the website and staying in contact with everyone.

For now I will say, I am incredibly grateful to all the people who have had kind words to say, been supportive, or just wondered where I found the time. I’m not giving up any time soon; I have a bunch of ideas for future books outside of the sequels for the little series I’m developing now. I just have to keep going with the writing and finding ways to get that writing into people’s hands, digital devices, or even uploaded directly into your brains once the technology exists. That last one might be a little over the mark…