The Plexus

I've got as far as I can on Perspective for now.

I've written a draft synopsis of it to go out with my submission to agents once I'm ready. That was an incredibly hard thing to do. It started off twice as long as it needed to be on the first draft, so had to get very ruthless in cutting it down.

I've also written a draft covering letter to go with it to the agents, although I will tailor it to each individual.

I've sent both of these off for independent review through the excellent Agent Hunter website.

So I'm waiting for feedback on these, plus on the novel itself from my son, Darren. I'm expecting to do some rewrites of all of them once I get their thoughts. Then it'll be time to submit and wait to see what happens.

I'm not going to be idle in the meantime. I'm in the early planning stages of my third novel, which has the working title of The Plexus. I've had the outline of it in my mind for a month or so, but it finally clicked over the weekend when Darren was visiting, and I had the chance to bounce a few ideas off him.

He had a couple of excellent ideas of his own, which I'm definitely not going to use, but they made me realise I'd been thinking about it in the wrong way. First thing I had to do was decide what the story was actually about - why did I want to tell the story? Now I've got that straight in my mind, everything else is falling into place.

In some ways, The Plexus is the bastard child of The Stream and Perspective, going out and living a life of its own. Although they're completely independent novels, The Plexus and Perspective take place in the same universe. The Stream is in parallel continuum, however - one I might pretend doesn't exist at some point, depending on how The Plexus evolves.

So I mentioned before that the music of Mike Oldfield seemed to help keep me going while writing Perspective. The Plexus definitely needs a change in musical inspiration though. I'm going with the works of Andy Partridge and XTC - mainly the XTC album Skylarking and everything that came after, plus the Fuzzy Warbles albums. I'll probably use some earlier XTC works too. So many great, underrated, songs.