My Family: Back to Work

Happy New Year!

With the optician's nightmare year of 2020 dawning, I thought I'd kick it off with a very short blog post.

It's a year that is likely to prove crucial to the future of the country as we leave the EU. Will we pull back from the brink, or continue down the road towards the authoritarianism that our post-truth culture could inevitably lead?

I fear we have further to travel down the path towards the darkness before a voice of sanity emerges at the head of one of our two main parties who will stand against the misinformation and division overtaking our country, Given our electoral system, sadly that's where it seems it must come from. I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, all we can do is be kind to one another and support those we love.

On a more constructive front, with the imminent publication of Transformation (once my proof copy of the paperback arrives, and I've given it a once-over), my focus is now switching back to My Family and Other Ghosts.

Over the Christmas period, my son kindly gave the draft opening chapters a quick read. I was feeling a bit nervous as to whether it was holding together as a coherent novel. It's so different from anything I've written so far, and I had a brief crisis of confidence as to whether I was up to it.

The good news is that his feedback was positive enough that I feel that I'm on the right track. He's given me a few ideas for consideration and made me realise I have a couple of things I want to tweak, so that's how I'm going to start off the new year. To get myself back into the swing of the novel, I'm going to give it a read-through, fix a couple of the issues that he raised, and make a few notes that will guide my way through the rest of part one. Even better, those notes will give a renewed focus for parts two and three, which is when things crystallise into the true reality of the world.

If you're wondering why there's a photo of B&Q, Chippenham on this blog post, well I'm just continuing the theme of pictures of places mentioned in My Family and Other Ghosts so far. Not all the locations are going to be as interesting or picturesque as Avebury, Lacock or the West Kennet Long Barrow!

Right, enough wittering. Time to crack on with it.