Fantasy Opus - Chapter 1

I'm now well into my second novel and it's likely to be much bigger than the first. In fact it may even spread to more than one book.

I don't know how writers like George R.R.Martin can plan to split a story into multiple books, as I only discover the full story as I write it.

I remember when I was at school we had an English teacher who told the class that all books were split into three sections: The beginning, middle, and end. I also remember being totally turned off by this notion. My writing doesn't come that way.

I love to discover the story as I'm writing it. I keep the whole story idea in my head, but some of the most interesting aspects come to me as I'm writing on the page.

In Zero Magenta the connection between Dimitri and Philip only came to me as I was writing, and it's one of my favorite parts of the story.

The bones of the new story are in my head now (I'm getting a right headache!) and the working title is "Fantasy Opus". One of the biggest influences on the book so far comes from a famous poem that I heard when I was about eleven years old:

"Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveler,   

   Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   

   Of the forest’s ferny floor"

Extract from The Listeners by Walter De La Mare.

That's all for now.

John Howes.