So What's next?

In the first week of April I start writing The Traitor of Light, my first original fiction in over six months. I'm a little nervous about this one; more than I've been with any other book, including The Hoard of Mhorrer. It’s obvious to me that this is the book that will make or break the Secret War series. It's a book that Macmillan turned down for reasons that I understood but did not agree with, and a book that is quite ambitious despite being about 50,000 words shorter than each of the first two Secret War books.

So why pursue a project like this?

Well, every writer asks themselves whether they have enough in the cupboard to do a new project justice, and this one is no different. It will draw on all my strengths as a writer, but will also demand that I strengthen other areas in my writing that are perhaps weaker. So in a lot of respects, this is my thesis - the book that will graduate me or will leave me frustrated. It's a risk, as I always believed it would be, but it's one that I'm willing to take because in the end, I don't want to write Secret War knock-offs. I want to write books I believe in, books that push me out of my comfort-zone, that develop my writing skills. Being a “safe” writer won’t do that.

Time will tell whether or not I can pull this off, but I'll tell you… I'm bloody excited about it.

But that's not all I'm excited about...