‘Mum, you’ve got to write a Blog’.

‘Mum, you’ve got to write a Blog’.

A ‘Blog, what’s that?’ I reply and as the eyes roll backwards into my eldest daughters head she explains it’s a sort of diary. So this is it, my thoughts and feelings on The Tessellation Saga, Prophecy’s Heir.  It’s just been published on Amazon as an ebook and I’m as nervous as a kitten, will people like it? Will they come to love the characters (well some of them anyway, could anyone love Toby?) as much as I do? Will they even be able to make it through to the end?  Like the title, the book is a long one. Well, to begin with it was just called ‘Work in Progress.’ It began like this…

My nephew Max had written a book for a competition and as he knows I read avidly he asked me to read it. I did and liked it so I told him so. We discussed his book for a while and he suggested I write my own.  You would have thought that I came home and immediately began to write but being a busy wife and mother and working shifts at London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, full time too, time itself isn’t always a commodity I have a lot of. Anyway a few days later I found myself ‘bookless’ something that never happens… I have bookshelves in every room in my house, even in the loo! I also raided my son’s room to see if he had anything new but again was disappointed, so rather than chew my nails I sat with him and told him what Max (my nephew) had said. We then began a discussion of what would make a good book. So really from the notes I jotted down as he and I talked, ‘Work in Progress’ began.

I always knew the hero was going to be called Gideon; I’ve always liked the name and have a dear memory of a cartoon goose on the TV called Gideon, it made my daughter Derry, cry every time she watched it. Wicked mother, I hear you say, but she cried when the short cartoon finished and because she wanted more.  The chapter where Gideon was born was actually the first chapter I wrote. When it was finished I sent a text to my son Simon and told him that Gideon had arrived, (silly really, anyone reading the text would have thought the baby real.) Then, ‘OK’ I thought, ‘how come a woodsman just happened to be nearby in a large forest when the young girl and her unborn baby lay dying.’ So the chapter about Jedadiah Green happened along, Blue, the wolf, was at first incidental as I happen to like wolves. Then the chapter about, why the young girl, (Gideon’s mother) was running wildly through a storm lashed forest with silk slippers on her feet and in fear of her life from soldiers? So that’s when I wrote the chapter about Lydia’s father King Gath.   Do you see where I’m going? Tess 1, as a work in progress was exactly that from the start, because I almost wrote the first part backwards!  Toby came to be initially because again, I liked the name. My daughter was expecting at the time and Tobias was ‘on the list’ for a boy. I hasten to add when her son arrived he was called Hendry; the name Tobias, or Toby had a very different feel by then! Strange isn’t it how one can be influenced by a few words on a page.

Got to go, need to do the ironing!