One Year On

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Just over a year ago I had written a complicated five-part serial for Woman's Weekly with 70s flashbacks and featuring David Bowie. It was accepted, scheduled for publication and I then rewrote it to the length of a short novel ready to publish on kindle when the contractual period allowed me to do so.

And then... and then the news broke that David Bowie had died.

I was so shocked. So, so shocked. It had never occurred to me that his creativity would one day not be there. I would have felt bereft anyhow, but I had just been intensively immersed in those growing-up years when his music had woken me up. The loss was unbearable. I couldn't do anything, couldn't promote anything. I wrote the Roundhouse 1970 poem because writing is my instinctive reaction to deeply felt emotion, but anything else seemed appallingly trivial.

So I left the blog as it was. And left it some more. A month became three months, became six. All through the writing of new stuff, the editing and republishing of my Regency backlist, I left my David Bowie tribute there at the top of the blog. 2016 was not a good year. More heroes were taken, good friends lost, there was a lot of personal sadness, but I still couldn't blog, couldn't bring myself - after this long - to move Roundhouse 1970 down the page.

It's now been a year. The grief is still raw. Mourning never stops. But ONLY DANCING will be out at the end of the month. It's time.