I want to talk about money, which is generally considered bad form at parties and possibly worse form on an author blog, but here we are.
There is a look a mystery reader gets about two-thirds of the way through a book. You will recognise it if you have ever watched someone read one of my novels on a beach towel and seen their eyes narrow at a perfectly ordinary sentence about a character putting the kettle on. That sentence is not ordinary to them. It is evidence. They have already decided that the kettle means something, and they are furious with themselves for not working out what.
There is a scene I rewrote so many times during the editing of Paula Langford Book Three that I stopped being able to read it as a story and started reading it as a series of sounds. Two characters and a question that one of them does not want to answer. I must have drafted that exchange a dozen different ways, and the plot never changed once. What changed, every single time, was how the words sat in the mouths of the people saying them.
The manuscript for Paula Langford Book Three came back from the editor this week, which means I have spent the last several days doing the part of writing that nobody asks about at parties. Not the plotting, which sounds vaguely glamorous, and not the first draft, which at least has the romance of creation going for it. This is the part where you sit with someone else's careful, considered, entirely correct notes and try to work out how to do everything they've asked without breaking the book in the process.
The Forgotten Corpse has been out in the world for four days now, which is just long enough for the initial adrenaline to wear off and the more familiar feelings to settle in. I thought it might be worth writing some of this down while it's fresh, partly for anyone curious about what the launch of a book actually feels like from the inside, and partly, I suspect, because writing it down is cheaper than therapy.
There is a particular kind of anticipation that comes with picking up a book you know almost nothing about. The cover caught your eye, or a friend pressed it into your hands with a look that suggested it would be worth your evening. You sit down, open the first page, and you have no idea yet what kind of story you are about to enter. I have always thought that is one of reading's great, irreplaceable pleasures.