Happy birthday to my baby!

With characteristic lateness, I decided that, on this freezing, icebound January night, I would wish my baby a belated happy first birthday. My baby is not flesh and blood, but it does have a life of its own.

On Sunday 3rd January, it was exactly one year since I had the dream that inspired me to start writing again. The dream that inspired a whole world to burst into existence. I can still remember every second of that dream, how frightened I felt, and how hard my heart was thumping when I sat straight up in bed, trying not to scream.
Since that day, I have been furiously writing, day and night, to bring that dream out of the shadowed corners of my mind and into the glaring light of the real world. It began with two hundred words, pencil scribbles in a notepad. It began with a kiss and a pair of bright blue eyes, and the sight of someone who scared me half to death. It began with the chase.

I didn't realise that, when I wrote those two hundred words, another two hundred thousand (and counting) words would follow. I didn't know it was going to be a book until it was, or that one would become two until odd, disjointed scenes started to drift through my head like memories from another life. I was convinced, when I started thinking about the third installment, that it would stay a trilogy -- until Monday morning this week. The dream I had the night before put paid to those thoughts. Turns out that this story will be a quadrilogy. I think. But, given a conversation I had with my brother last night, there could end up being at least five in the series. What's the word for a five-book series? Quintrilogy? Hmmm...

Right now, I'm quarter of the way through laying down the first draft of the third in the series. In two weeks' time, the hard, agonising, exhausting work of editing will resume on books one and two (deinitely-the-final-final and second drafts, respectively), and then I'll send book one out into the big, bad and brutal world of agents, editors and publishers. But, for tonight, I'm going to give my first baby its spot in the limelight.

Happy birthday, book one.