Ready To Turn Back At The Highway's End

Yesterday, I finished the first draft of Devil's Highway.

It's finished, of course, and nowhere near finished. As with last year's crime novel, most of it was dictated onto a digital voice recorder, and still needs typing up. That process becomes something of a rewrite in itself, but also the moment where the book finally starts to assume concrete form, words on an (electronic) page. There'll still be a lot of hard graft to do even then, but a lot of the time I actually gain some confidence in the work, as the succession of rambling monologues I recorded actually start to gain some clarity and order.

I'll be dotting comments throughout the MS - details to fix, foreshadowings and callbacks, all the fine tuning - and the typed draft will probably be overlong and need paring down, but once you've got that to work with...

Well, I won't say it gets easier as such. 'Differently hard', maybe. A lot of the time it becomes about the individual stories of the characters, fine-tuning the steps of their journey from where they were at the beginning of the book to where they are at the end of it. But from now on it's about working with something that's been made, rather than actually making it.

And that's where the fun begins.

So having reaching the end of the Devil's Highway, it's time to turn round and head back to the start.

Here's that cover again. Because it just looks so bloody good.