As you may have already heard, I’m currently writing the sequel to Siobhan Dowd’s wonderful The London Eye Mystery. I’m about half way through the first draft of The Guggenheim Mystery (more on that below), and the book will publish in August 2017. We’re currently working on a cover, as well, so keep watching this site for more information in the coming months!
As part of the celebrations for The London Eye Mystery‘s ten year anniversary, Puffin are releasing a new edition of the paperback. It’s absolutely the same story in every way – but it has a brand-new introduction written by me!
Some introductions to books spoil their plots, which I think is an extremely un-detectivelike thing to do, so I can promise you now that I give nothing away – it’s just my recommendation of an excellent book that I think you should all read. I’m so proud to have been asked to do this (I got a little teary when I saw my name on the back cover of a book that I love so much), and I hope you like what I’ve written!
The new edition will be out on 1st September 2016 in book stores, but you can pre-order now from Waterstones, Amazon and Blackwell’s.
And about that sequel … as I said above, I’m about halfway through the first draft of The Guggenheim Mystery, at the bothersome place where the story feels a lot like a large knot that I’ve been asked to untie with my teeth. I’m not telling you this to cause you (or my editor) anxiety – from previous experience, I know that as I keep working, the knot will untie – but because I get quite a few emails from people telling me that they’ve run out of inspiration half way through a story, and worrying that means they don’t have what it takes.
I am here to tell you not to worry. If you have this problem, it means that you are a writer.
What you need to do (and what I am currently doing) is re-plan, re-read and work out the moment in your story where the thing went wrong; where someone found something out at the wrong time, or met the wrong person, or went to the wrong place. Change it. Then you can knock those changes forward, until you reach the part of your story where you had to stop before – and this time, miraculously, you’ll be able to keep going. The key is not to give up, no matter how much you may want to.
So good luck unknotting your story knots. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got one of my own to untie …
