It’s been a long road to get here. Two different artists, neither quite capturing what the publishers were looking for, designers being admitted to hospital – you couldn’t make it up.

But here it is, as close to final as I’ve got. There’s still a teensy bit of smoothing-out and finessing to do, but imagine, if you will, matte gold foil on the title, and a spot-UV treatment on the twiddly bits to make them shine in the light, and you have it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the UK cover for Songs of the Earth:

Ain’t it pretty? You can click on it to make it bigger. Go on, you know you want to.

So the first of the cover art is in – and from Spain, no less.

It’s not a scene I would have chosen from the book, I admit, but it makes a damn fine cover nonetheless. Apparently this is a very commercial treatment, in the Spanish market.

The title translates as “Under the Ivy”. Click on the image to see it in all its 2.5Mb loveliness. Muy bonita, no?

Rumour has it there may be a Part II to this post at the end of the week, when the UK cover art is in. Rest assured I will be sharing it with you just as soon as I can.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had some very exciting news.  I’ve been told that I might have some roughs for the cover of Songs of the Earth to look at soon.  With my editor, we’ve finalised the cover copy a.k.a the bit on the inside flap that makes you, the reader, start salivating as you fumble for your credit card.  And I’ve got a tentative publication date.

Naturally, as Gollancz are still working the kinks out of their schedule for the first half of next year, there’s still an “ish” factor here, so I won’t be revealing the date until I know it’s firm, but it does mean that the countdown to launch has begun.

This is becoming alarmingly real.

Songs is moving from an electronic file wrapped up in a dream to something solid.  Tangible.  A physical object that I can hold in my hands and inhale that “new book” smell.  I cannot tell you how much that excites me.

It also terrifies me.  In a couple of months my editor will crack her knuckles and set to, and I imagine the process of delivering a final typescript that she’s happy with will be rather like childbirth.  There will be sweat and swearing and probably tears, and if things get really rough there might even be a little blood, before the finished book is smacked on the bum, weighed, measured, and packed off to production.

In the meantime, I’m not exactly sitting on my hands here.  I still have Trinity Moon to finish.  Although progress has been slow of late due to a variety of health-related issues (which also explain the infrequent updates to this blog), the strands are coming together into what I think will be a satisfying whole.  A bit darker than Songs in several ways.  A bit more menacing.

Watch this space.

Someone asked me the other day why I write.  Easy.  I write because I don’t know how not to.

I’ve been a storyteller all my life.  Since I could hold a pen, and make marks on paper that weren’t just copying something off the blackboard.  It’s as natural to me as breathing.

As time went on, the stories got longer, more complex.  I’d get an idea and just run with it, to see where it took me.  When I was 14, one of those ideas took me on a wild, 260-page adventure cranked out on an old Adler portable typewriter (forever remembered as the Tripewriter) in one-and-a-half linespacing.  I can still smell the carbon paper.

That was my first attempt at writing a book.  Of course, I didn’t tell anyone I was writing a book; that kind of admission, in high school, can have Consequences, and I was already in enough trouble with the cool kids because I wore glasses, didn’t smoke, and handed my homework in on time.  Talk about making it hard for yourself! How I got out alive is anyone’s guess.

Of course, like most first attempts at novels, it was a load of rubbish.  Derivative, cliche-ridden and agonisingly bad prose, but I enjoyed the process.  More than enjoyed it.  I was hooked.  I wrote more.  When my Dad brought home a BBC Model B computer (he was involved in the schools IT advisory service for the local education authority at the time) I taught myself to use the basic word-processing package that came with it and the words continued to flow.  Now I could write into the night without the Tripewriter keeping the rest of the household awake.  Bliss.

But I never thought I was writing for an audience.  I was writing for me, because I wanted to find out what happened next in each story.  Years passed, as they are wont to do, and “Songs” limped, in fits and starts, into something approaching novel length, though I still refused to call it a book anywhere but inside my head.  I had a subscription to Writer’s News & Writing Magazine, and I called myself a writer, but that was it.  I still only had an intended audience of one.  Me.

I can’t remember what prompted me to put an excerpt up on a writers’ website for some feedback.  Probably chivvied into it by my husband.  Even he hadn’t read anything I’d written up to this point, but I guess he saw some potential underneath all the self-doubt.  That was the first time I’d ever given house-room to the idea that actually, there might be people out there who would want to find out what happens next as much as I did.

Revelation.  It was a whole new world.  People said nice things about my writing; some of them even said they’d enjoyed it.  Whoa.  Headrush, even bigger than the one I got the first time I said, out loud, to another person, “I’m writing a book.”

This was just the confidence-boost I’d needed.  I joined another site, got more feedback, finished “Songs” and with some trepidation, submitted it to literary agents.  I was fully prepared for rejection, but I knew it wouldn’t stop me writing the rest of the books in the series.  Nothing could, short of ceasing to breathe, because I had to find out what happened next.

All the stories are in my head, you see.  Layers and layers of them, too big and too dense to see the whole thing at once.  Each time I write a scene, it’s like it makes a space through which I can see the next one.  So I write that, and there’s the next one, on and on like a conjurer’s gaudy handkerchiefs.  I have a pretty good idea where it will end, but it’s the getting there, the discovery, that’s the exciting part.

That’s why I don’t plan.  Scratch that, won’t plan.  Can’t.  I’ve tried, and it hammers almost all the creative magic out of the process for me.  If I try to nail the story down beyond a vague outline what I write feels, to me, flat.  Forced.  In some unquantifiable but deeply important way, wrong.

You see, it’s not about  knowing what happens next.  I already do, subconsciously, somewhere under all those layers.  No, what’s important is the Finding Out.

That’s what the email said.  The email just received from my literary agent, currently on holiday somewhere hot with unreliable internet access.  The email that said my agent has received a bloody handsome offer to publish Songs of the Earth and the next two books in the Wild Hunt series.

Fuck.

So I’ve started on Book 2 of “The Wild Hunt Trilogy”, “Trinity Moon”.  I confess, I’ve cheated a bit – there was a sub-plot in Book 1 that I was deeply attached to but it wasn’t deeply attached to the rest of the opening story arcs and just didn’t fit, timeline-wise.  So I cut it out, all 40-odd k of it, earlier this year and realised that it should have been in Book 2 all along, and I’d been trying to cover too much ground in Book 1.

It needs an edit, since it hasn’t had the same amount of attention that Songs has, which is what I’m doing now, and the excitement has started to build.  I’m getting that little wobbly buzz under my breastbone again, and I’m absolutely dying to get through the edit and start turning the plan into some real new chapters.

Oh, didn’t I mention?  I’ve actually got a plan for “Trinity”.  Me, the walking definition of a pantser, has A Plan.  I’ll have a synopsis next, just you wait.

It’s done.

The final edit on Songs, that is.  I should be relieved, elated, but I’m not.  It feels like an anticlimax (there’s that word again).  I was expecting some great rush of triumph as I hit the final full stop and clicked “Save”.  Instead all I got was “Jeez, is that the time?”

So what am I going to do with my evenings and weekends now?  I have been living and breathing this book for the last year; my husband looks up when I enter the room and asks “Who are you again?”

But that’s me.  When I’m writing, I am totally immersed in it, saturated by it.  I think about it on the loo, in the bath, on the train, in the five minutes between phone calls at work when I really should be digesting the latest epistle from HMRC.  Now that it’s done, I find myself vaguely bereft.

My reading has been sadly neglected.  Richard K Morgan and Joe Abercrombie stare reproachfully at me from the shelves where their new books have been sitting, unopened, since I bought them the day they came out.  Unread books in this house are an Abomination, and I have two dozen Abominations in the study.  I’m afraid to go in there.

So I’ve started querying agents.  I’ve been writing stories since I could write, pretty much.  Started aiming at novel-length fiction when I was a teenager.  I read once that the first million words is just practice and if that’s the case, I’ve served my apprenticeship and then some.  Let’s see if we can’t make all this hard work worthwhile.

Any writer will tell you it’s hard work writing a novel.  What’s even harder is the final edit, when you have to trim and prune and polish until the damn thing shines so bright it’s blinding.

Unfortunately all that trimming and pruning and polishing means cutting stuff out.  Stuff you love.  “But it’s mine!” you howl.  “It’s mine and I love it and I don’t want to be parted from a single word of it.”  Sound familiar?

No matter how much you tell yourself that it’ll be a better book for it, you won’t believe it at first.  Then you’ll get to a point say 35% of the way through and you start to develop a bit of detachment and think yeah, I can do this–and what’s more, it’s fun.

This carries you through the next 50% of the job, and then it all comes to a shuddering halt, right as you turn into the home straight.  This is where I find myself today.

I’ve done the hard part, taken 15k words out of a somewhat overfed manuscript and rewritten a few chapters that just weren’t cutting it.  The result is cleaner, tighter, better paced and does more with less.  I’m well happy with it.

My problem is this.  In the big finale–I hate to use the word climax.  Maybe it’s my mucky mind but it just seems, well, rude, quite frankly.  It is inextricably linked to gentlemen’s top-shelf periodicals and Newcastle’s only blue movie cinema, which had a name beginning with C and ending in ax, with a lime in the middle.  But I digress.

In the big finale, the bad guy doesn’t appear.  I thought long and hard about this, and decided that he should.  It is, after all, his show.  And I had an idea that he should saunter on set in one of his Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen silk shirts and taunt My Hero about his girlfriend.  It’s the kind of thing he’d do.

So I started looking for where I could engineer an appearance by the bad guy.  And bugger me if I couldn’t find one.  The finale chapters work so well as they are that shoehorning anything in is just going to upset the balance (and you don’t want to start upsetting the balance in the Force, mate–anything could happen).

I therefore find myself in a quandary.  My head says a finale without the bad guy and My Hero squaring off is not much of a finale at all.  Dare I say it, an anti-climax.  And my heart is saying, don’t bugger about with it or you’ll spoil it.  Of course the logical way to approach this is to employ the wonderful “Save As…” command and make a copy of where I’m at right now, try the edit, and see if it works.  If it does, great.  If it doesn’t, no harm done, go back to the backup and all it’s cost me is a couple of late nights (sucks having to work for a living, eh?)

I am, however, a writer, and therefore only peripherally acquainted with logic.  None of this book or either of its sequels has been planned.  It has evolved on tea, chocolate biscuits and four hours’ sleep a night (sucks having to work…etc)

Aargh.

This, as my dad’s colleague used to say, is a two-biscuit problem.  I need more Hobnobs.