This is a post about writing and books. Specifically my books. I apologise for this…

Back in 2019 I started writing a trilogy of novels with a plan for all three books and a time scale within which I intended to have them written. This is not entirely true as I had actually written the first 20000 words of the first of these novels a year or two before, then it had sat around waiting for me to rediscover it and try to work out what the novel actually was about.

In case your wondering, it is perfectly possible to write 20000 words and have no idea about the story you are telling. This is what first drafts are for, this is where ideas develop and characters come to life. Not everyone writes this way, I do however to an extent and it works for me.

In any regards in October 2019 I came back to a file called ‘Maybe’ read through it and started jotting down ideas. This was after the second Hannibal novel had bene released and I needed a break from him before I wrote the third. So I started toying with Maybe again after leaving Hannibal was plummeting to his death… He was to fall for three years…

The Hannibal novels average around 85000 words which is a tad long for genre fiction but not excessively so. With Maybe I tried to write shorter novels, so around 60000 words per book was the plan (the first ended up at 65k) they were to be brisk, fast and fun. and I planed to spend 6 months writing each of the three and bring them out in march 2020, September 2020 and finally march 2021. 60K words every 6 months was easily doable in late 2019.

Once the Maybe books were done I would return to Hannibal with the third novel , A Squid on the Shoulder, for which I had a brief outline of with all the major plot points and characters noted down. If you have read Squid and the first Maybe you may have an incline why I wanted to finish the maybe books first…

In any regard, the best laid plans saw Maybe, the first of the three planned novels come out on the ids of march 2020 with everything on track , and then Covid hit.

Despite this Maybe’s launch was successful enough and it has been one of my most popular books ever since, however, tt turns out a global pandemic causing you to be stuck at home, is not conducive to writing at all. Almost no one wrote ‘the great lockdown novel’ and I was no different. By the time I was in a mental place to write once more the impetus for the Maybe novels had faltered, I had a few thousand word I had written before covid but they lacked the urgency of the original. It seems slow and forced and I was not sure how to get it going once more.

Since the pandemic I have written a host of short stories, and two novels, those being the third Hannibal novel and Lucifer Mandrake. I have a couple of other novels in the works as well waiting on the right moment to finish them, and the two remaining Maybe books to write.

Now I am aware that I have been promising the next Maybe novel for some time, at least once a year every year for six years now. But recently I went back to what I had for the second book and went to it with a new idea and new angle and a new way to tell the story I want to tell. It is my genuine hope to get the next book written by October to come out before winter. It is slow going, but it is coming together and I am close to half way through the novel, least ways if it hits the 60K mark as intended. I have been avoiding this book for 6 years but finally now I have another book to avoid writing I have the time to write this one.

So Eliza, Benjamin, Inspector Grace, Perkins and perhaps even Gothe are on there way back…

A storm is brewing in the mid Atlantic and the airship Maybe’s Daughter is caught up in the middle of it. Benjamin West is hanging from a cargo net after someone tried to kill him. Eliza Tu-Pa-KA is trying to save the airship, unaware of West’s plight. Meanwhile in a realm beyond the mortal world, the soul of a dead man faces a stark choice.

Hopefully Perkins will put the kettle on before it all goes too far…