I finished the Ice Breaker rewrite yesterday and emailed it to my Aust publisher and also to my agent who has sent it to the US. So we are now waiting to see if the US publisher likes it. This is always a nail biting time, so cross your fingers for me!

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while probably know what I should be doing now. Getting back to Brizzlehound, right?

Um … no. Wrong. I’m afraid Brizzlehound has fallen in a heap. This is what happened:

After I finished the first rewrite of Ice Breaker, at the end of January, I needed to leave it alone for a week or two, so that I could see it a bit more clearly when I came back to it. Aha, I thought, I’ll work on Brizzlehound for a couple of weeks. But when I read through what I’d written before Christmas, I realised that I had fallen out of love with the book. It’s not that it was so terrible, what I’d written. I just didn’t love it enough. And to put in all the work that needs to be put into a novel, you have to really love it.

I think a couple of things went wrong. First, I think I started writing Brizzlehound too soon after I finished Ice Breaker (this is last year I’m talking about, when I thought Ice Breaker was finished), instead of letting things settle and seeing what I really wanted to write. Second, I feel as if it was way too soon to go back to the world of Dunt and the museum. Cos that’s what Brizzlehound feels like – a backward step. And I don’t want to step backwards. I want to step forwards.

So – deep breath – I’m stopping Brizzlehound. Putting it aside for however long I need to. It might still get written one day, but not now.

Instead, I’m starting work on a companion novel to Ice Breaker. The working title is Children of the Claw. I don’t know a lot about it yet, but it’s getting a little clearer as I play with the idea. And I think I can fall in love with this one quite easily. But just to be sure, I’m not going to start actually writing it for a while. I’m going to spend the next few weeks plotting, to make sure I’ve got a story I love, that’s strong enough to carry me right through to the end.

I phoned my agent, Margaret Connolly, with this news last week, feeling a bit nervous about telling her. And she said, ‘Ah well, these things happen all the time.’ Phew! Made me feel a lot better about it.

So my apologies, if you were looking forward to reading another book set in Dunt. But sometimes things just don’t work out the way you think they will. And believe me, the world of Ice Breaker is just as exciting, if not more so!