It growed and it growed...

...in all sorts of ways. Charlie herself has grown on me. I joke about her visiting and telling me the story that I then note down, but that is the relationship I have with the character and it is not one I have ever experienced before. Several of my main characters have been close to me in that they are reflections of my self. Charlie is something else altogether.

And her story has grown as well. When I started, I envisaged a single, extremely condensed novel using a very fragmented structure. It soon became clear that that would not work. I wanted to involve people in Charlie's story (which is unusual enough) before involving them in unusual text.

There were four parts to the story from the outset, so it seemed natural to expand that to four novels. Four short novels. But in considering the structure of all four, it became clear that the first book had to do certain things. And to achieve those, to tell what needed to be told, I would need another 60,000 words on top of the 60,000 already written.

This realization was a little dizzying. The finished work will no doubt edit down to something shorter (100,000 or thereabouts), but it means I get to spend more time in Charlie's company. And for that I am grateful as I have never had so much fun writing a book as I am having with this; and the best is yet to come.