#should be writing
The story that was accepted by Fox Spirit earlier this year was originally written, in first draft at least, in summer 2014. It went through several revisions before I submitted it, but it is a two-year-old story.
In the interim I have written a series of 11 interlinked stories that, cumulatively, come to 105,000 words. My first readers like them and, after a revision process, so do I. Anyway, they are now with an editor for assessment prior to me thinking about what to do next with them.
I didn’t start out to write stories in what is essentially a horror genre, but that’s what came out, at least for the most part, on one way of looking at them. Having said that, I haven’t gone out of my way to adopt or follow any genre tropes, and when I’ve spotted them I’ve either deleted them or tried to subvert them. To the extent that “influences” are consciously invoked as part of the writing process, mine are Muriel Spark and George Mackay Brown, with side orders of Njall’s Saga, Dorothy Dunnett, Christopher Priest, M John Harrison, and a half-remembered Len Deighton novel. Not that anyone would see the influence, that’s not how it works.
But there are also elements from my time on the Childrens’ panel in Lothian Region in the early nineties, and my reading of 17th century criminal cases in Scotland, especially witch trials.
So now I’m wondering what’s next. I have three things in notebooks at various stages of development, all novels (I think): one is a direct follow on to the stories I’ve just finished; the second is a strange mash-up of Muriel Spark and Sandy McCall Smith set in post-WW2 Edinburgh; the third is something mixing some of what I did in my Honours year in my first degree with the Umberto Eco of Foucault’s Pendulum.
At present the follow-on volume is most likely, in part because the other two will require more research than I currently have time to do. In any event, they should keep me out of mischief for a while.
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