January the 3rd, 2012

I’ve actually set this blog up on the advice of my publisher, as a tool to promote my forthcoming novel. (The publishers now have the proof version, and I’m assured it’s only a few weeks away. But then this is publishing, and everything takes much longer than anyone can possibly imagine.) This is my second book, my first now out of print thanks to the swift bankruptcy of that particular publishing house. (Let’s hope we’re all luckier this time around.) Therefore these words are supposed to exist to tell people about this new novel, to let them know of any promotional activities I’m doing and so on. To be honest, the one thing I really didn’t want it do when I started thinking of it back in November was frighten.

But then I started to have these dreams. Night-terrors so frightening that they didn’t just exist within the safe confines of my skull, but seemed to reach into my soul and tear into it with sharpened talons. Then the dreams seemed to spill out into real life. Suddenly I’d see something that I’d dreamt of the night before. It wasn’t a perfect representation (trust me, if and when these things start coming true we will all know and fear it) but the image in front of me would be close enough to what I’d dreamt – a benign version as it were – to show me that I shouldn’t just dismiss the pictures now conjured in my head.

This forum probably isn’t the right one for what I’m discussing here. And yet I feel I have to get some of this shit inside my head out, and so announcing it into the void to cyberspace just seems like the best way to keep myself sane.