Don’t get too excited because it’s not finished yet. That’s the bad news, but the good news is that it will be worth the wait. I hope.

Writing novels can be a perplexing process. Sometimes, everything just flows and the story appears like film off a movie reel. Other times it feels that way, until you go to view the unedited finished product, and discover to your horror that something is wrong. Badly wrong. The scenes all move from one to the other in a logical kind of order and the characters speak their lines and make their marks, but somehow the whole thing seems oddly flat. It’s as if the actors keep looking towards the director as if to say, am I doing this right, because it feels like something is missing? And the director, that’s me, tells the actors to do it again, only this time try it this way, say that line with more feeling, more emotion. Okay, the actors say, but I know they’re not feeling it because the lines on the page are dead. They have expired and the words lie there like the corpses of small birds battered by a storm. I try to breathe life into them, but Frankenstein tried that and all he got for his troubles was a monster, right?

Okay, movie metaphors aside, what happened with my first draft was that I knew it wasn’t right, but I thought I could fix it. Halfway through the second draft I realised my fix wasn’t working, so I stopped writing and started trying to figure out what the problem was. After a few days I had achieved nothing, so I took a break from the novel, which is often a good way to clear my thinking, and I spent a couple of weeks doing other things that I’d been neglecting, like approaching some agents about representation. I would really like to see The Flyer and the rest of the trilogy published in paperback and made available in bookstores. Publishing them as e-books doesn’t really work for this type of book, in my opinion, simply because a large proportion of the people who read non-genre type fiction don’t use e-readers.

Anyway, back to the novel in progress. When I came back to it, it was immediately clear that my earlier feeling that it wasn’t working was bang on the nail. I had sort of hoped I’d be wrong, but I wasn’t. I still couldn’t see exactly why it wasn’t working. Without going into too much detail, I had written a story set during WW2 that was part espionage drama and is mostly told from the point of view of Rose, William and Elizabeth’s daughter from We Should Dance, though at the beginning Rose is unaware that William is her real father. There was actually nothing really wrong with the story. The plot was good. I liked the characters and I felt that the novel had the right blend of pace and depth. It took me another week to work out why it didn’t feel right. The problem was that it didn’t really feel like a continuation of the other two books. Duh!

Sometimes it is the really obvious things that are the hardest to see. When I first set out to write The Flyer, I had a clear idea of what it would be about. I wanted to write the story of William, who grows up feeling lonely and isolated because he has no place in the world. He wants acceptance and love, but the people who can give him those things reject him and this makes him bitter. It was that internal conflict that I wanted to write about and I chose the setting of WW1 flying because being a pilot in those days was a very solitary and individual role and it seemed to fit William’s persona. I also wrote the story in a very subdued style because I wanted the writing to reflect William’s sense of removal from the mainstream of the world he lives in. I’m proud of the end result. The Flyer is the book I always wanted to write.

The sequel, We Should Dance, follows William’s life after the war. He is still battling with the same internal issues, which partly explains his almost obsessive love for Elizabeth. He and the other characters begin to leave their youth and the war behind in this book, but at the heart of the story is William’s determination to make his way in the world, to find his place. At the end of it he is in his mid-forties.

The problem with the third book in the series, I came to realize, was that it wasn’t about William. I had decided that I was finished with William’s story, and that the unresolved issues that remained between him and the other characters would be played out with the next generation. William only appeared at the sidelines. There is a scene in the book where Rose as an adult meets William for the first time and discovers that he is her real father. I wrote it over and over, trying to make it work, but it just sat there like cold pudding. It was because I was writing it from Rose’s point of view. There was nothing wrong with the way I described her feelings and reactions, but it was William’s feelings I should have been writing about.

William had always felt excluded from society, rejected by the class that Elizabeth and Christopher belonged to by birth, and rejected personally by Christopher’s betrayals. Even when William and Elizabeth had a child together, Christopher conspired to make sure that William could never know her. When Rose learns the truth at last, her reaction isn’t to throw her arms around William and cry Daddy, but rather she sees him as somebody her mother has conducted a secret affair with for years. She is hurt and confused and she rejects him. How does William feel, especially as his own son despises him?

So, I have to start my story again. I thought I had finished with William, but it was always William I was writing about. I think this third book will be the end. A trilogy rather than a series. I want to be as proud of this one as I am of The Flyer, so I won’t rush it. In the meantime, I thank you for your patience.