A year has passed since setting down the opening lines of a new work; the windblown seeds of which first drifted into my consciousness more than twenty years ago.
At the time, I’d fasted for four days and nights in a grove of moss-cloaked, lichen-fronded oaks, nestled in the hills overlooking Barmouth, North Wales. The surroundings became a looking glass, a scrying vessel and a wireless connection, through which the voice of the landscape spoke; lyrical, clear and potent.
I left Wales, much healed, and those new seeds came with me. I tried to write the story gestating within in their nucleii but, having only set down poetry before that moment, I lacked the maturity, both psychologically and authorially, to do those mystical kernels justice. That work, much of it hand-written in a spiral-bound notebook, became my first unfinished novel – a failure at the time.
But I had detached myself from among the wallflowers on the side-lines and joined the writers’ ball; committed myself to those reels of joy and disappointment, wherein every dancer turns and stamps alone.
Their germination unsuccessful, the seeds re-entered cryo-sleep for well over two decades.
Until, in 2017, two things happened:
First, on the way to school one morning, I happened to outline the unfinished tale to my daughter, aged nine at the time. She said, “Dada, you should go back to the beginning and write that story all over again.”
And, I thought, yes, I really should…
Second, an inspiring meeting with the gentleman who became my literary agent gave me a reason to begin a new work of Fantasy. The dormant seeds re-awoke and I began to make pages and pages of notes and drawings, determined, this time, to find a way through to the end without getting lost.
Creating a new world over the intervening months has involved all the usual heartaches. This second attempt, however, has resulted in a work commensurate with its mystical genesis among those gnarled, ancient trees. Regardless of whether it makes the hyperspace leap from manuscript to book, it has become a magical artefact; worthy of a reader or two.
For now, as ever, I wait on the opinions of others to find value (of a marketable, monetary nature) in the work that flowed through me between August 2017 and August 2018. Should the gatekeepers find the novel acceptable, I hope you’ll be able to share in the enchantments that came to me in that solitary vigil on a Welsh hillside all those years ago.
into 2019, I suspect – here’s an autumnal poem…
Seeing as it’s been almost four years since the Black Dawn series was published, there’s something I want to tell you.
Some weeks ago, I began a new novel, the details of which I posted 
If you are, I’ve just found out that you can request review copies of 