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.

A message in a bottle...

So, I figured I'd begin as though we are dear friends, long-lost lovers, who've sadly lost touch with one another. As though, by writing here, I am calling to you across the echoing dark of cyberspace in the hopes that you will hear me and call back your own distant reply.

Nothing much has changed since we last spoke. My family are well, friends have come and gone, as you did, and the world has turned. Nothing much has changed, but everything is different. After you left, I lived -- no, I didn't live. I existed -- in a blurry, dead haze where nothing could reach me. I waited for you in restless slumber, until one day, my eyes opened and the fog had lifted.
I had dreamt while I slept, and in my dreams I saw him. I dreamt of his beautiful face, his eyes shining like the deepest blue sapphires, his smile burning through me -- through her -- like white fire. I saw his face through her eyes, felt his touch through her skin, felt his kiss on her lips. I felt the adrenaline running like acid through her veins, the spike of fear stabbing into her and impelling her to flee. Even now, almost a year later, I can still hear the ghostly drum of her heart beating like a jealous echo of my own. I can feel that panicked metronome driving mine to pick up pace and my breathing to grow ragged and short, as though I am being chased, not her.

I awoke with his face clear and her emotions startlingly intense in my mind, and realised that I was not waiting for you. I was waiting for them. My whole life, I was always waiting for them.

The wait was worth it.