Late Saturday night I came to a state which I would imagine most authors love and dread at the same time. I finished the first draft of my book ‘Bronwen’s Revenge’, which is the second book of the Castell Glas trilogy, after ‘The Hiraeth’. I am so grateful to have finished it; okay so it will need more work in the form of some rewriting and editing but I feel relieved that I’ve managed to pull all those pieces together and hopefully it will make sense and a readable story.
Finishing a book brings the dread; the feeling of loss in some ways. For so long we live and breathe along with our characters, so much so that they feel like intimate friends and it’s hard to leave them. When I finished the first one I wrote, ‘The Sixpenny Tiger’ (as yet not published), I was bereft and for a while could not think of anything else to write, apart from poems or the occasional short story. I thought that was ‘it’, the only book I would ever write but, just a few months later, I got the idea for ‘Bell of Warning’, then ‘Rosa’ and at the same time, a children’s book called ‘Robin’s Ring’ which I serialised on Facebook, then ‘The Hiraeth’. The ideas were coming so fast I couldn’t write them quick enough! And they have not stopped since. I intended ‘The Hiraeth’ to be a one-off, complete story but once I had finished it I knew that Bronwen was so evil that I would have to continue the story and now it will be a trilogy. I never thought I would ever write a trilogy…
So, now I have a problem. I always leave a new story for a while before I edit, so I can come to it with ‘fresh eyes’. So, what do I do in the meantime? I had planned to finally do the rewriting and editing on ‘Sixpenny Tiger’ because it keeps complaining that it’s always at the back of the queue to be put out there. However, I have at least three other books that are in the planning, and ‘Robin’ is clamouring to be brought out again – not to mention that Bronwen is chomping at the bit to do further harm to the Armstrong-Lloyd family…
