December 2005
Advent
As a writer, you live in a kind of permanent advent – waiting for something momentous to arrive.
Maybe inspiration? If that's you, check out our Advice to Writers pages – or maybe have a look at our creative writing courses at West Dean College in West Sussex.
If it isn't inspiration, it's your agent's notes on a draft. Or your editor's queries – 'Should she really have blue eyes in Chapter 3 and brown eyes in Chapter 17?'
Then publication. And I have been very lucky, my agent finding publishers for Labyrinth in – I think – 25 countries. So publication over and over, with chats to journalists and trips to foreign parts: both east and west coasts of Canada and the United States in a week; speaking with an interpreter and an actress to read aloud from the novel in Germany; a writer's hotel in Amsterdam; a trip to Courmayeur for a thriller festival with the Italian edition from Piemme.
There are other writing spin-offs, too. Articles for Sunday newspapers, travel and culture ideas. Books of the year. Judging of competitions – most recently for women's writing magazine Mslexia.
Also in the New Year … paperback publication of Labyrinth, for which I'm writing a special edition insert entitled The Labyrinth Walk, an illustrated guided tour around the fortified Cité of Carcassonne. Then the Chichester Writing Festival that Greg and I are directing …
And in between these bursts of activity – periods of deep concentration and introspection, writing a new novel.
Perhaps I should look back at my home page diary archive and see the kinds of things I was feeling and communicating at the same stage in the first draft of Labyrinth. Will I feel the same this time, I wonder …
No two journeys through the Labyrinth are the same.
