Ready to publish at last! A Single Light

I've been tinkering and fine tuning A Single Light for over a year now, getting it ready for publication, making sure everyone stayed the right gender and with the same hair colour from start to finish, and tightening the chapters. Not to mention making sure they were numbered correctly! Near the end, I decided to go into more depth regarding the background of the Afflur and Bledray culture. It felt like they needed a bit more explanation to move them away for handy supernatural beings to a "people" doing what they have to for survival. A writer is never done!
Finally, though, it has been finalised, covered, and sent off to the printer. You'll be able to buy it from Wednesday 17th February (and if you all purchase it from Amazon on the same day, we may be able to get it to No. 1).
It has been a long road. I wrote the first draft of A Single Light back in August of 2005. It took me three weeks of full time writing. Along the way, I've juggled characters around; changed gender of one, cut another completely, and restructured some of the locations.
A Single Light is set in and around the Sutherland Shire and Royal National Park between The Balconies and Jibbon Beach, not far from the well-known Wedding Cake Rock. The Royal is an amazing location. So benign on the surface with lots of great walking tracks and sites to visit, and so close to Sydney, it's easy to forget that it's still the bush, and the bush can be dangerous. Walk off the tracks (if you can) and you'll be quickly swallowed up by thick vegetation. Keep walking and you'll find yourself sweltering the bottom of a gully with air close and hot, tall trees, and no landmarks to aim for. Nearby are houses, paths, numerous other bushwalkers, and the ocean, but you won't be able to find them or hear much over the eternal buzzing of cicadas.
Similar can be said for the sand dunes of Cronulla. Not as large as they once were yet still retaining a vague sense of menace. People have been lost there before and continue to go missing. Stay on the tracks people! The sand can be tricky.
I've thought a lot about theme for this novel. I keep coming back to circles and time as an abstract concept.
This quote from Dr Who sums it up pretty well, "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff."
I'm still working it all out in my own head though and my writing is progressing from undefined theories to something a little more meaty. I hope so anyway. We'll have to wait and see in my next novel. That's the beauty of writing fantasy, each story clarifies my thinking until I arrive, eventually, at my destination.
So, that's another novel wrapped up and almost delivered. My next is started and I'm aiming for publication in 2017.
I had better get back to work!