Author's Notes

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Between 1981 and 1999, I produced 39 notebooks related to my artwork and video making. The images in Notebooks Gallery are extracts from some photos, collages, diagrams and texts taken from those three thousand seven hundred pages.

Editing, editing and more editing! I’m working in depth through Boy & Girl (that’s the name of my latest novel, folks!) reading it out loud, sentence by sentence, to hear if it sounds right. It’s an excellent method.

I have just finished writing my new novel. I began writing it on February 8th 2012. Now two and a half months later and 114.000 words on, I have completed the most exciting and promising books I have ever written. Of course there’s editing to do, but the way I write, which involves a lot of editing as I go forward, means that I already have a pretty solid manuscript in my hands.

Strangely enough, this morning I began drafting the outline of the next book …

I am some ten chapters from the end of my latest novel, Boy & Girl, and up to yesterday I still had no idea how it would end. Then suddenly in the evening everything fell into place and the end was clear and startling and brutal. Maybe it was because I could not leave the story on that note that I awoke in the middle of this night with all the words of an epilogue tumbling into my mind. I got up and wrote those one thousand words and then could go back to sleep content.

With following paragraph, I just passed the hundred thousand word mark in my latest novel which I began two months ago:

Jumping between minds no longer seemed a suitable expression. If Peter were to enter the warrior priest’s mind, guarded as it was by an iron will, grim determination and years and years of gruelling practice in warding off mental attacks, he had to shrink mentally to minuscule proportions, denying his natural desire for space and influence. To gain access, he had to barely caress the person’s shielding skin, so that that which had been rigorously trained to bar entrance, relax its hold, unsuspecting as he ghosted passed, effortlessly skipping over the barrier, like the gentlest of breeze. The challenge of being so tiny was that the slightest puff of wind or even the most insignificant of vagrant thoughts might hurtle him off course.  To resist such influences despite his size, his thoughts had to be as clear as the sky after heavy rain and his focus honed like the razor sharp edge of a deadly blade.

Inspired by a short extract from my new novel, the story fragment Inside Out is part of thought about the future to be carried out in the Writers Circle in Basel. In this case, it is about the future of medicine, learning and knowledge. Here are the first few sentences:

It seems so strange to our eyes now, but at the time they couldn’t see things otherwise, the healer explained, talking mind-to-mind to a handful of apprentice healers around the world. In those days, they came at the body from the outside. It wasn’t simply that they didn’t have our techniques to enter the body with their minds … (read on)

These last two months have been the most intense and prolific period of my writing career till now. On February 8th, I began writing a new novel. At the time, I was busy completing book four of the Storyteller’s Quest, but the new book erupted with such force in my mind and badgered me with people and ideas that I couldn’t ignore it. Now two months later and 80’000 words on, I am in the thick of the story about the adventures and misadventures of  Peter, a twelve year old schoolboy unsure of who or what he is, his adorable lesbian girlfriend game for anything, his adoptive mother in quest of a son lost in child birth and a girl magician Peter encounters in another world that is about to be invaded by warrior priests.

This new book is a break from my earlier writing in that it is written from only one perspective, that of Peter. It is also set historically, at least the part that takes place in our world, being set in 1960. You’d be surprised how much of what we take for granted didn’t exist on Friday May 13th, 1960 when Peter meets a new girl at school, who, unknown to him, is out for his blood! If that sounds like it’s about vampires, you have been misled. There are no vampires or werewolves in the story, at least not so far, although some of the characters do act like monsters.

The novel, which is clearly aimed at young adults and adults who enjoy YA literature, should be finished in the next few months and will hopefully be published early next year.

The above diagram is that of Peter’s house.

No, not Peter Pan. Peter is the code name for Alan McCluskey’s latest novel which is currently being written. Read a short extract from the beginning of the book and see a map of the island of Drailong which figures later in the book.

I’m having a delightful time writing my new novel. I’ve just completed the first fifteen chapters (they are shorter than in my earlier novels) in less than a month.  It’s a story about a twelve year old boy and his (mis)adventures with girls. I love the way it twists and turns, surprising me, making me laugh, even horrifying me at moments. To be honest I have no idea how it will turn out, but if it keeps up at this pace readers will not be able to put it down.