tl;dr – Buy the book, tell me all your thoughts and maybe (please) write a review on goodreads or Amazon for it 😛

Well! Here we are in that cautious and nerve-wracking place where I’ve pushed something tenuous and defenseless out into the world and now I have to wait, with bated breath mind you, for feedback.

Swann is only a little thing.

It’s half the length of Light’s Shadow but it could only ever be the length it was. When writing it I knew roughly the entire shape of the book by the end of the first chapter. That’s not to say there weren’t significant revisions (aren’t there always?), but it was only ever going to be a small story. In all truth I thought it would be far shorter than the 66 thousand words it turned into. I originally envisioned Reuben’s story amounting to something more like 40 thousand words – nobody likes a teen novel that overstays its welcome! Especially one that doesn’t have pathetic sparkly vampires or a dystopian landscape to bolster the word count.

WordPress is now telling me that ‘dystopian’ is not a word… If only…

There are things that I want to say about the book. Lots of things.

All the things.

But I’m also wary of saying anything at all.

If I make comments it will skew the way people read it (provided they bother to click through and actually read this blog post – I’m looking at you- That’s right, you. You and your friends who asked me what Swann was about the day after I’d posted the blurb!). But I’m torn – Natalie Imbruglia-style.

I’m hopelessly curious about how this one will go down. No, that’s poorly phrased because I was desperately curious about how Light’s Shadow would go down as well.

This one is different.

Not different because I care more or less about it. Different because it’s smaller.

It’s only a little story.

It deals with little things and silly moments and a world that is as narrow and unfairly simplistic as I could manage to make it.

Reuben is just a kid. He’s a very particular kind of kid. He has opinions and interests that might even make him a little abnormal, but I thought I managed to capture that kind of beautiful naivety that maybe we can all remember in our own way.

Evelyn is just as intricate. She’s probably the most difficult character I’ve written to date because so much of what she is remains hidden for the entire book.

Maybe I’m already saying too much.

I won’t say much more for now – it’s still early days.

All you readers out there, I hope you enjoy the book. Talk about it – tell everyone you know and all those other people that you don’t that it is a thing and it’s possibly worth their time 🙂

Until next week.

-P