I’ve just emailed the first draft of Alfie Slider and the Frozen Prince to some beta readers. For me, I think this is the hardest part of the writing process; that first sharing of ideas outside the safety of my immediate family.

I’m consoling myself with the fact that my kids love it. They’re 9 and 5, and I’m reading it to them as their bedtime story. My 9 year old berates me about my love of cliff hangers every night, and we usually end up reading 2 or 3 chapters rather than the one I had planned.

Frozen Prince is a different book to Shape Shifter. It’s more like several mini-adventures in one book than the steady ramping of excitement to the climax that the first book was. It’s a bit more complicated, too. With the Alfie Slider universe explained in Shape Shifter, Frozen Prince brings in several new alien races, more technology and the first off-world trip for our intrepid heroes.

I never work on just one thing at a time, I’m usually working on the plot of one thing, writing another and editing something else (with added short stories) and that’s true now too. I’m writing a Young Adult, Fantasy, book with Danny Crow called Wonderling, which I will tell you more about at a later date and I am working on the plot for a new 9-12 adventure book about a girl, talking cats, spying spiders and the balance of good and evil.

Frozen Prince was a tricky book to write. It didn’t flow like Shape Shifter did, but then I hadn’t been carrying it around for a year wanting to write it and not having the time! It wasn’t written in one go, but in several sections with months of working on Shape Shifter in between, and I’m surprised at how well it hangs together.

When the kids are back at school in September I will start the editing process, it helps to take a break so you can look at it with fresh eyes.

But that will have to fit around getting Shape Shifter ready for publication…