A terribly lovely girl

If you’ve read any of the previous volumes in the A Little Something To Hide series, you will know that there is an origin piece that sits at the end of each story which I use to explain the background to each character.

Those snippets often form the basis of these blogs, albeit with the spoiler risks removed. To read the full origin piece before the story would be like hearing the results of The Traitors before you’ve had a chance to watch the episode on catch-up. Don’t do it – you’ll annoy yourself.

Equally, I don’t want to annoy you, so when I sat down to craft this note, I discovered that what I’ve written for Jeannie’s origin gives the entire game away and would be damnably frustrating if you later chose to browse her tale.

That leaves me with a foreshortened blog post on this launch day for Part eight – Jeannie, so I thought I’d share a little about some other work. There are three volumes left in ALSTH with which I’m still tinkering: Simon (a Catholic priest), Jimmy (a white supremacist) and Felipe (a Colombian national who fled the drug cartels) – I’ll let you know more about each of them closer to their publication dates.

While I’ve really enjoyed the process of serialising ALSTH, what I’m most excited about is returning to my next book, Dignity. I wrote the first two chapters back in 2003 on a flight between New York and Los Angeles. It then atrophied for sixteen years before I resurrected it in March 2019 at the start of my full-time writing career.

A Little Something To Hide intervened as a more pressing volume to release to the world, but Dignity has nibbled at me the whole time, the third draft mocks from the shelf behind me, insisting it will make me sneeze when I finally blow the dust from its pages.

Some time has passed since I last looked at her in April, so I’m really looking forward to reacquainting myself with the story. It’s inspired by the Deacon Blue song of the same name, a song that stirred memories of my childhood in New Zealand where the book is set. Just writing this is enough to motivate me to pick up the red pen for the next round of changes. Of course, I’ve no idea when it will be ready to face the world, but be assured, I’m tapping away at the keys.

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Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury.  Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com

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1 October 2024