Bill Hussey

Hello, your friendly neighbourhood Caretaker here…

My plan last week was to begin a short blog about the final stages of writing Book 2 (currently titled ‘The Absence’). This was to run alongside a blog which would record the weeks leading up to publication of ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’ on 10th July. The idea was to scribble a few lines, here and there, describing a smooth and uneventful final edit… Okay, ‘smooth and uneventful’ is always an optimistic ambition when nearing the end of a book. Inevitably, you’ll find bit of gristle in the veins of the story that must be cleaned out, fat that must be trimmed. Sometimes you’ll discover a great big chunk of wayward plot clogging up an otherwise healthy artery (don’t worry, these cardiac allusions are going somewhere). On Monday 5th May, at about 11.30pm, I put down my red pen. Friday’s deadline for handing the MS into my agent still glowered on the horizon in blood-red tones, but I was ahead of schedule. Yup, I could see nothing in the road ahead that might trip me up.

Then, at a little after midnight, my heart decided to burst clean out of my chest…

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Fictional horror story first –

The idea for ‘The Absence’ came to me one hot summer afternoon as I was standing in a long Post Office queue. There were two old fellas in front of me, chattering away about yesteryear. Except that this yesteryear wasn’t filled with Junker bombers, ration books, Betty Grable and Bakelite radios; these tales were far older, plucked from an ancient collective memory. My queue buddies were of a dwindling breed: true, honest-to-God Fenmen – descendants of that vanished race of Breedlings that made its living from the East Anglian marshes. Their forebears had been reed cutters and fen fishermen who, once upon a time, had used stilts to traverse the great swamps of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. After the drainage schemes of the Seventeenth Century much of the world of which they spoke had simply vanished.