Authors Electric

I detest the word ‘closure’ when it is applied to bereavement – it’s meaningless. It is usually used when a milestone has been reached along the journey from the loss; a sense that something significant has been achieved that was left undone before. It’s a step, not an end.  I was thinking about it particularly at a family ceremony earlier this year. Almost forty years ago, my youngest brother and his wife had a stillborn child. There had never been the money for the kind of memorial they wanted/needed,   until then. We met, all of us, in the pouring rain to bury our parents’ ashes in the baby’s grave and to witness the completion of the lovingly-chosen headstone and the ‘dressing’ of the grave. We needed words. I read Kathleen Raine’s beautiful poem ‘Spell of Sleep’. It begins , Let him be safe in sleep As leaves folded together As young birds under wings As the unopened flower. And ends, Let him be healed in sleep In the quiet waters of night ...

As I strolled along the beach yesterday, paddling in rockpools and generally being the four-year-old I still am at heart, an idea 'happened' in my head. From nowhere, apparently, it burst upon me and grew into a plan for the sequel to Charity's Child. Not the sequel I've been planning for about two years, which has continually failed to materialise, but a wholly new 'take' on following up the lives of the characters I created in that earlier book. It may have been something to do with the appearance of the rocks at low tide (there is such a scene in Charity's Child , where a big decision is made), or perhaps it was just that I finally relaxed enough for my creative side to wriggle free of all its constraints and start to play again. Anyway, here's hoping. It's always dangerous to say too much too soon, and I'm certainly not going to tell you anything about the new book. But it's good to be reminded of the way these things work. Fiction...