Emotional Colour

Finish it.

I did write a book of fiction. It is out there and it has been read by so many people. 'What about the next one?' Many ask. 'When can we read it?'

Isn't that a wonderful question to have as a writer!

Writing book one took all of me, at least everything I was to the point I finished it, which was 2010. I came up with the idea for book two about a year before that, in 2009. My time from 2010 to 2012 was largely spent getting book one polished and published. All the while book two brewed and bubbled in my mind, busily evolving the bones of a story from the stew of imagination. In 2012 I started writing it. It is there, the bones, but in writing this second book I have learned a lot, not just of what it takes to craft the lives and dramas of whole new characters, but in the kind of writer I am.

From the moment I started writing properly in 2002, it has been a release valve. Reflected in the words are all my frustrations, hopes, dreads, loves and murderous rages. Most of all writing is a means for my emotions to be gently let out. Emotion for me, I have learned, is everything. I'm telling you now like I've always known this, the reality is it took a hard year of struggling. It has been a year of plotting and progressing slowly, driven now by the need for a second book to create a broader commercial canvas. Some of the writing has glowed but so much has been dry - words and actions strung around momentum in the name of a story.

Finishing book one really had taken all of me. Everything had been expelled in creating Sarah Sawacki's story, the emotions of my imagination given colour by the books, images, video and music, were all now part of that book. Very little remained inside of me.

Fortunately this is a restless mind. I have realised the struggling isn't so much that I haven't got another book in me, it's that I'm busy creating a whole load of new imagination to pour into book two. The research has been as much discovering the content and colour of the emotions as it has the technical detail. This is after-all a learning process, I'm coming to understand it always will be.

Book two is about a man who makes a living protecting people, coming to terms with the murder of his wife. It is about him discovering why. It is now busily being animated, the dry words given emotional colour. It is being written because I care for the story, it is being crafted for a commercial audience to share and enjoy, not just so I can expand my canvass of work. Book three will be the next stage in Sarah Sawacki's story. I'm very keen to find out how much of what went into her first story will be there for me again. We will see.