Work in Progress: WALL2

Mainly what I’m doing write now is reading the manuscript for The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Book Two) with my editor’s comments in mind—and in general it’s rocking along, which is great. I remember reading the ms for The Heir of Night at a similar stage, when I had been away from the story for a time—and finding, when I got to the final confrontation in the book, that I was holding my breath as I read. “How does that work?” I thought. “You wrote this, you know what’s going to happen!” But I took it as a good sign that I found  the story exciting reading! And I guess it always is a good sign—for any book, but especially for your own manuscript—when you find yourself caught up in the story’s flow!

But I still need a book to read and at the moment it’s French author, Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Hedgehog is not SFF or speculative fiction of any stripe at all, but I have been meaning to read it for quite some time—and in fact, I don’t exclusively read speculative fiction; far from it! The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes highly recommended—the first three pages of the book comprise glowing reviews and the legend on the cover proclaims that it spent “over a year on the New York Times Bestseller List.” So it has to be good, right?

Well, not necessarily, but I did find the first few pages intriguing, which is always a good start. I have found the subsequent chapters a little slow going, but I am only about a 1/5 th of the way through, so it’s early days.  ‘Watch this space’, as the saying goes.

Speaking of ‘watching this space,’ tomorrow I am interviewing Mary Victoria, author of Tymon’s Flight and the Chronicles of the Tree series, about Samiha ‘s Song, the second book in the sequence—which I have read and talked about here. I have very much enjoyed putting the interview together and been fascinated by the discussion around both the world of the Tree and the characters so am excited to be sharing it with you at last.