I know it isn’t Easter yet, but after a month of hard writing (in those small patches of blue that that prisoners call ‘commuting’) I thought I’d come up for air.

I’m well into writing new material that will go into the revision of The Sigil. I’ve done just over 27,000 words of what might be around 70- to 80,000 words of extra material which will be folded in with the 178,000 extant with butter, flour, sugar and the zest of one lemon, reduced after an editorial simmer and … we’ll see.

You’re welcome to read the story so far. I’m posting it all on the LabLit Community Forum as I go. Not that it’ll make much sense without having been sewn into the whole thing.

If you do decide to plough through this lot, I should add two warnings. One, that it’s work in progress, so full of typos and other oddities.

Second, that were this made into a film, it would have an ‘18’ or ‘R’ rating for graphic sex and extreme violence. So if you are in any sense squeamish, perhaps it’s not for you.

However, to save you the trouble of actually having to read it, I can sum it up in two words: Space Opera .

When I drafted The Sigil two years ago, I had intended it to be SF, but it became a much more personal story, about real people and their relationships, and the SF elements were pushed into the background somewhat.

At the time I thought that as much as I love SF, perhaps more character-driven, small-scale fiction was really my forte. That’s the trouble with any kind of fiction, or writing in general – it takes some time before you find the ‘voice’ that suits you, and that voice might be surprising, not least to the writer. No-one was more surprised than me, for example, to learn that a beardy, middle-aged and heterosexual science editor naturally fell into writing about personal relationships from a female perspective. But there you are. And on the basis of that stuff my agent said she’d take on my fiction as well as the nonfiction she’d been handling for years, so I guess it must have worked.

The reaction to The Sigil was that whereas it was good, in it’s way, it wasn’t SF (although it must be said that some SF people loved it as SF). One SF editor I know said that the draft suffered from a rare complaint for SF novels, which was “an excess of characterization”.

So then I went off and wrote By The Sea, a kind of contemporary gothick police procedural (imagine an episode of the X Files set in Norfolk). Jennifer Rohn kindly serialized that on LabLit and you can read it there if you like. By The Sea was excellent training in the discipline and pacing that The Sigil lacked.

But I couldn’t put The Sigil down. The ideas and characters were too good to waste, I felt, and my agent agreed. For long unable to decide how to approach editing a ramble more than twice as long as most novels, I had a flash of insight – I wouldn’t cut it, I’d expand it, bringing scarcely told back stories right out front.

And now it’s beginning to look like it’s going to be a riproaring Space Opera in the style, I like to think, of Iain M Banks or Peter F Hamilton. And what surprises me most is that when I stop being self-conscious about writing; when (in the words of SF agent John Jarrold) I just try to do ‘good’ writing rather than ‘fine’ writing – in other words, when I stop trying to impress, and just have fun – it’s absolutely effortless. The writing just … happens … almost without my trying. A commute from Cromer to London and back with my Asus Eee Road Warrior will routinely result in 2000 words – words which I think are good, and which make sense, and which, after a routine tidy-up on my laptop at home, I think I can post with pride. I think I might have found my fictional ‘voice’ at last and the discovery fills me either with perfect happiness or the signs of terminal addiction – when I am not writing this, I am thinking about writing it, to the extent that all the usual distractions of human life become irritants.

Why did I shy away from writing outright, no-holds-barred SF before, then? Looking back, I think I was afraid that I might not be able to write Space Opera without sending it up. But now I have realized two things. The first is that my reticence was borne of a lack of confidence, now dispelled by the discipline and sheer bloody hard graft of writing By The Sea.

The second is my growing awareness that Space Opera, perhaps uniquely of all literary subgenres, is impossible to parody. When you try, you’ll find that your efforts are Assimilated and what you get is better Space Opera. Resistance is Futile.

In Space Opera, you see, no alien can ever be too weird; no locale can ever be too exotic; no weaponry can ever be too apocalyptic; no hero can ever be blessed with too wonderful a superpower; no heroine can ever be too pneumatic, and no conspiracy can ever be too labyrinthine.

Once all this is realized, you realize that there is no point trying to be too literary or too clever; that the aim of the exercise is, simply, to write a rattling good story.

That’s my aim, at any rate. I shall let you know how I get on. And if you do fish around in the draft material, do let me know what you think.