Like Neon

Everyone has a book like this

BACK TO PAGE ONE

There’s this book I was writing in 2019/2020. I was working on the end when the pandemic hit. I put it down for a pause before editing, then wrote another book which became Titanium Noir (coming May 2023) and then my parents died, I stepped into big shoes to polish my father’s last unpublished novel (Silverview) and then wrote the sequel to Titanium Noir.

And now… Like Neon still works. I still love it. But the background has changed. My soft background of environmental collapse looks positively benign, for example. I got some guesses about the pandemic wrong. And… I’m older. Hoarier. Covered in lichen and craggy with wisdom and granite and alpine lakewater.

I’m a better writer.

So now here I go: back to page one to flavour a four year old vision of the future with the view from now; to make it deeper, stranger, bleaker, more hopeful, more alive.

All this I will do while I edit a bunch of other stuff, work on TV shows, and repair holes in my roof with evil Venom-suit goo.

I don’t want to rip it all up and start again. Some of it is really, really good.

Some of it isn’t.

This book is becoming my Moby Dick (the whale, not the novel).

But I’m gonna harpoon the wee fecker with kindness and get it to a better bit of ocean.