I wrote my first novel, The Sigil, in a headrush that lasted four months.

After reading it, my agent’s sage advice was to put it aside and write a ‘puzzle book’, something that would encourage me to exert some self-discipline. The Sigil established that I could write fiction, and that I could create believable characters (one SF editor who’s seen it told me that it suffers from that rare affliction, an excess of characterization). My next task was to concentrate on plotting.

That’s why my next novel, By The Sea (you can read it in serial form here) was, for me, an exercise in constructing a plot. My agent’s sage advice has paid off: I am now completing chapter 20 (out of a planned 24) and after months of rather deliberate writing, events are moving thick and fast to a climax; all the disparate strands are coming together, and all the clues I have left buried are beginning to surface – including all the red herrings.

For the first time I feel as excited about By The Sea as I was when writing The Sigil- exhilarated, light-headed, as if I’ve been submerged by a huge breaker and only now pushing my head above water.

But unlike The Sigil, when, as I approached the end, I felt I had to keep revising the plot as new ideas kept popping up, the ending of By The Sea will play out exactly as it should: the result of all that thought has produced a climax that unspools at exactly the right pace, without effort. Not that the last few chapters won’t need careful handling, but it’s more a matter of getting the mood and tone right, rather than ordering the events.

In short, I’m excited. I anticipate completion mid-October – after which the remaining episodes will be serialized courtesy of LabLit. In the meantime I’ll go through the whole thing once more before I can close the book, as it were, and send it to my agent for her opinion. I’ve told her to expect it at Hallowe’en.

Which seems, somehow, appropriate.