Alison McQueen

Blog

Clutter Curse

Posted: September 20th, 2012

I am not a hoarder. Never have been. There is nothing in our attics. Why box stuff up and shove it up there, never to see the light of day again? I don’t understand why people do that. When we moved here from our last house, we threw all the attic detritus into a skip without even looking at it. (Actually, that’s not entirely true: anything that was thought useful was taken to a charity shop.) Continue Reading »

The Last Mile

Posted: September 20th, 2012

Good news: Orion love the new book, or rather, the new manuscript. The bit in between, meaning the part of the process between a loved manuscript and a finished book, is the part where I start to get twitchy. Before a novel is finished, it belongs to me. I can do whatever I want with it; hack bits off, add a little here and there, wake up in the middle of the night and change that one word that’s been bugging me. Yet once it’s been handed in and signed off into production, that’s it. It is no longer mine. It’s out there on its own, grown up and gone, left to stand on its own two feet. Continue Reading »

The Heebie-Jeebies

Posted: September 10th, 2012

The manuscript for the new novel has been in the hands of my lovely publishers for about three weeks, and the heebie-jeebies are beginning to creep in. It takes a while for a manuscript to be read, thought about, commented upon. Details aside, the most I hope for, the one thing I hope for more than any other, is that the reading has been enjoyed. The story is complex, as relationships so often are, and such things have to be handled sensitively, with subtlety. Yet knowing what I know in my head is no guarantee that it will actually end up on the page. In the name of subtlety, there is always the danger of skating too carefully across the thin ice and leaving the reader wondering what on earth’s going on.  Continue Reading »