What I’m writing next

What a ride! I mean the Giro d’Italia, of course, and I’m not even going to try to guess what might happen on today’s stage.

But I also mean the blog tour for A Spoke in the Wheel. I had tremendous fun visiting other people’s blogs and talking about how my new book came to be.

And I also mean my travels around Europe – the sleeper to Stockholm, the Semmering line, the Zentralbahn and Jungfraubahn, and the whole three weeks of it.

I suppose you could say I’m now in the warm-down stage. Getting my breath back. I’m not writing a huge amount at the moment; I’m fulfilling a couple of pre-existing commitments, and, of course, writing this blog post.

My next task is to finish writing up my travels of the past couple of years. The Isle of Wight Coast Path and the Camino Inglés, and then this year’s Grand Tour, before I forget it all. (This morning I woke up from a dream where I was at a railway station somewhere in Flanders helping set out a tea table in preparation for Rev’d Richard Coles returning with a school trip, while a truncated Saviem Standard full of Tesco shopping bags did a handbrake turn in a very narrow lane. Nothing like this actually happened.) I’ll be posting all of that, together with a selection of photographs, on this blog.

I’ve also seen an idea I like for another ‘photographs of other people’s books’ series, which I’ll probably kick off in a month or so.

I have promised myself that I won’t start any more big projects until after the travel writeups are done – which means, of course, that the next three books are all trying to write themselves at once. I make no promises as to which order they’ll come in, or even whether they’ll ever happen, but they are:

• the sequel to Speak Its Name. I haven’t yet managed to persuade myself that Scandal and Folly wouldn’t be an excellent name for it. (But then I have form in this department.) Not everybody can make the letters of Saint Paul sound like a bodice ripper.
• the post-Brexit Ruritanian swashbuckler, possibly with ice dancing. (Got to get some sort of blade into it somehow…)
• the murder mystery at a fan convention.

As you see, the chances of my picking a genre and sticking to it remain low.