May 2006
French publication
Since I last wrote, the Chichester Writing Festival - of which Greg and I are co-directors - took place at West Dean College in Sussex, with preposterous success. There was an extraordinary buzz of enjoyment and creativity throughout the three days.
Following that, I spent a week in France doing to location scouting ...
When I started doing the research for Labyrinth, I had only fragments of a story. Oddly, those fragments were from both the medieval period - the story of Alaïs - and the contemporary period - the story of Alice.
The medieval story was the first to gel into a whole - a writer I know says his tales coagulate like blood!
Then, as the modern part of Labyrinth came together, I found the action switching from France to the UK and back again ... and I was never completely happy with this.
To start with, this meant more characters in order to people the two separate locations. It also made it harder to keep track of time - two different times of day - for the reader and the author. (It sounds silly, but holding all the details of your novel in your head at once is probably the hardest thing a novelist ever has to do.) And the travel between the locations became so much dead time and that was a drag on the pace of the novel.
Of course, it was extremely painful cutting scenes I loved and enjoyed - but it was the right thing to do.
There were other changes along the way, some of which I have already talked about in these home page diaries. But the re-centring of the action entirely in France is in my mind just now because French publication is coming up soon.
The translation is great, the advance publicity creative and effective and - I hope - people who are likely to enjoy Labyrinth should get to hear of it. But it's a strange feeling, knowing that only after all this time is my novel - set in France and imbued with French history - going to appear in the librairies. After Italy. After Germany. After Holland, Poland, Spain, Catalonia and the US ...
So, Paris at the end of the week and, later in the summer, signings around Carcassonne itself. In the meantime, I have started work on my next novel and in the autumn I should be able to publish some of my new research ... I hope you enjoy it!
Keep turning in the Labyrinth.
