Next!
I’m happy to say that the first draft of my next book, my fourth, is done. It clocks in at just under 110,000 words. It is a set of stories (one novella plus some short stories) that take forward the tale that I last explored in Coyote in the Corner in 2021.
It’s taken longer to get to the finish line with this than I anticipated. I’m pleased it’s done but I’m also slightly bereft. The process now is that three friends have a copy to offer feedback on in due course and when I have their comments I put the text through at least two more full scale revisions before I think about publishing it. Amongst other things, the revision process will probably cut the wordcount down (unless I spot any glaring gaps, in which case all bets are off.)
I’m happy with the directions that these stories have gone though they didn’t end up where I thought they would when I started them. In the drafts at least, there is a hidden archaeology of things I’ve seen online or come across in books in the course of writing that trigger a thought that nudges me in unexpected directions. One story in the collection came from a song title by Phish, for example, and another from reading MR James. A couple lean much more into the vampire mythos than those in Coyote.
It will almost certainly be published as The Butcher Bird in the first half of 2025 and will be the last I write about my vampires, I think. Probably.
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For quite some time (since 2022 at least) I’ve been collecting ideas and material for my next book(s). I need now to sift that material and random old ideas from my notebook to identify what I want to use and then figure out the stories I want to tell. I have not yet decided whether to write three separate novels in a sequence or three novellas in one volume. Time will tell. I do know that they will be set in a version of 1930s Edinburgh.
As I may have mentioned previously, the first story will feature a dancehall and a private club (no alcohol in public dancehalls in Scotland until the 1960s). This has meant listening to a lot of dance orchestras and bands of the period, mainly British but also the Quintette du Hot Club de France. This has been great!
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