Yesterday I had lunch at Corrieri's in Bridge of Allan with my friend Ann. I'm not posting a photograph of us having lunch, because Ann is a modest person and does not very much enjoy being photographed (especially not when she is in the middle of eating a dish of pasta). So here is a picture of a Corrieri's cup of tea instead.
My new novel Ghost is dedicated to Ann, who was a huge support when I was working on it. Ghost took me longer to write than any of my other books, and the process was far more difficult.
I think many authors probably have a tricky bit in the middle of writing a book; you start out feeling fresh and optimistic, and hopefully you eventually type "The End" with a sense of achievement, but somewhere in the middle your spirits sink like a poorly-made soufflé. The plot seems ludicrous, the characters seem wooden, and the whole thing seems to be taking far too long.
If you are an author who is reading this, and you never have that soufflé moment, I salute you. But I always have one. And that is only during the first draft. Several rounds of structural edits later, I often start to wonder whether I can "write" at all, and other careers suddenly seem amazingly attractive: gargoyle carver, perhaps, or hermit-in-residence on a large country estate (NB that second one really does exist; they are called "garden hermits", apparently).
Writing Ghost was a particularly grisly experience and there were points where it would have been easy to give up the entire project and tackle something else altogether. But when I was feeling at my lowest ebb, there were two people whose support kept me going: my daughter Iona, and Ann. Both of them are mentioned in the acknowledgements; a previous novel, The Glass Demon, is dedicated to Iona, and so Ghost belongs to Ann. I would like to thank them both for "believing in" Ghost.