Return to the House of Fox

This Friday will see the release of my fourth novel, and to celebrate the occasion I’ve decided to write this, a half way serious blog post about the book, in the vague hope of shifting a few copies.

I’m of the personal opinion that Return to the House of Fox is the best thing I’ve ever written by a country mile, as I feel for the first time I’ve undergone the proper procedure involved in creating a novel. There are zillions of blogs out there that will tell you what you should and shouldn’t do as you go about crafting your magnum opus - I have read them and, for the large part, completely ignored them. The first House of Fox was a largely improvised affair, shoved together from fragments of crazy dreams and stream of consciousness nonsense with no real idea of what the final outcome would be. A few edits and an email to the Publisher in the hope she would work her usual magic and weave the thing into something tangible, and that was pretty well it.

With the second book, however, I found myself taking the more traditional approach, not necessarily out of choice, but rather because of mitigating circumstances. I got two thirds of the way through the first draft and my hard drive died, killing my poor old computer and, as I had rather foolishly neglected to back up my work, flushing my efforts down the drain. My finances weren’t great at the time, meaning I couldn’t afford a new PC, and so HoF2 went back to being a concept, rather than a construct.

The story continued to grow in my head, and several months later, with a shiny new laptop to work on, I began the second draft from scratch. Things went well at first, but as any wannabe writer will know all too well, there comes a point where you hit the wall and all progress stalls. Around the same time I was unexpectedly made redundant and was suddenly up shit creek in my day to day life, and HoF2 went on the back burner for a while.

When I eventually got back into the writing, I found myself sitting staring at the words, knowing something was wrong, but unable to put my finger on what it was. In the end I realised I had made a huge mistake. Originally, the road movie elements of the story were set in the USA, with a traditional coast to coast voyage, delivering the characters ultimately to Las Vegas. Trouble was, I’d never been to the USA, and for all the time spent observing the county through its various media outlets, I simply didn’t have the geographical knowledge required to fill up a novel. The idea then struck me that I could transplant the action to somewhere I knew all too well; Wales. Instead of Las Vegas, the road trip would bring us to Rhyl, the down market, low rent, North Walian equivalent. The notion was so preposterous I laughed my tits off for two days straight, and I saw how much fun I could have depicting a town I hate so much. Trouble is, this would require an entire rewrite, not something I’d ever untaken before. But sod it; it would be worth the effort. I rolled up my sleeves and wrote draft three right from the beginning.

I got finished, performed a few edits and emailed it off to the publisher. Lisa, bless her, is incredibly patient with my output, and eventually responded that while she liked the book, it was unpublishable in its current state. Originally, HoF2 was peppered with additional short stories throughout the narrative. While I’d thought these short stories gave an interesting background to various characters, Lisa explained they actually disrupted the novel and made it unreadable. So, hey ho, back to the drawing board and version four was knocked together.

So, two years’ work has gone into HoF2, and the finished product is something I’m incredibly happy with. Finally, I’ve made the effort to write a proper novel, rather than take short cuts and get the thing done as quickly as possible. This isn’t my usual explosion of lurid colours, flung haphazardly at a canvas, but rather a carefully crafted cupboard, with drawers that pull out smoothly and don’t fall to bits in your hand. Of course, inside the cupboard lurks the usual cornucopia of porno mags and machine guns, but this time around they’re neatly stacked.

Return to the House of Fox will go on sale Friday 16^th November. It is available for pre-order here

The original HoF is available free on Kindle this week, just to whet the appetite for the upcoming release. Click here.