I’m nearly done with the copy edits for Under a Silent Moon – just some queries to check and another read through – and today I’ve got the itch to write something new.

Fellow NaNoWriMo author and all-round genius Julia Crouch calls this ‘draft zero’, the writing you do that nobody will ever see – experimental, rushed, occasionally beautiful. Most of it will be edited away. For me, this is the best part of writing, letting the story take me somewhere I wasn’t expecting to be. I never really (if I’m being honest) get the urge to edit. I don’t feel that pull, that emotional hunger to go to the shed and pick apart writing I’ve already completed. What I do get is the urge to create. It’s almost visceral.

Having studied art history at university (along with many other useful subjects) I always found it fascinating how the most amazing works of sculpture by Michelangelo, Bernini and Leonardo all started out as blocks of marble. The art was inside, waiting to be revealed – and only the artist could do it. Imagine the pressure!

Here’s Michelangelo’s unfinished ‘crossed leg slave’ – see what I mean? It’s like the sculpture is struggling to free itself from the stone surround. And it will stay like that forever, won’t it? Because the artist isn’t here to finish the process of liberation.

Crossed Leg Slave (1520-1530)

Not sure what I’m trying to say here. Maybe that I have that pit-of-the-stomach pull towards a story at the moment. I have a vague shape to the story and it’s sitting inside a metaphorical block inside my head, waiting for me to try and get it out. It’s exciting and a bit terrifying, knowing that I might accidentally chop a bit off that’s quite important, or get the shape of it completely wrong. The great sculptors did sketches, both on paper and out of less expensive stone, but I have to write without preparation or else I get bored and distracted.

My themes: I want to write about fear, unrequited love, making mistakes and then making more mistakes when you’re trying to fix things, acts of kindness that change a stranger’s life, cruelty and its consequences, about mending lives that have been destroyed. And revenge. Or maybe retribution.