Six Years in the Making

People assume a novel begins with a story. Mine began with a mess.

For a long time there was no book. There were notes. On my phone, on the backs of meeting agendas, in whatever notebook happened to be in the bag that week. A line somebody said in the office, or on the metro home. The way a dog waits at a door. None of it added up to anything. I kept it because it refused to be thrown away, not because I knew what it was for.

It also would not let me sleep. A thought would arrive at two in the morning, fully formed and very sure of itself, and I would reach for my phone and put it into Notes rather than trust myself to still have it at seven. A good deal of this book was first written by somebody half awake, typing in the dark, spelling badly.

What people say without meaning to

Somebody once told me you should never say anything to an author, because your conversation might turn up as a plot in someone’s book. They were joking. They were also right. Much of this novel began as something a person said to me without thinking, and I wrote it down without thinking either, and years later there it was.

Most of the early work was not writing at all. It was talking, and then listening harder than the conversation strictly deserved.

And not only talking. Some of it came from looking at whatever was in front of me and refusing to find it ordinary. How a room rearranges itself when one particular person walks into it. What people do with their hands while they are waiting. Which silences are comfortable and which are being managed. None of that is invention. It is attention, kept up for longer than is entirely polite.

I have always written. Short things: poems, the occasional article, a thought worked at until it held its shape. A book was something else entirely, and for years it did not occur to me that any of the notes were going anywhere.

What changed that was a sentence somebody said to me. He told me that I motivated him and asked why I did not do something with that. Become an influencer. Give a TED talk.

I had no wish to stand on a stage. It was the first time anybody had suggested that what I was already doing might be useful to someone else. That was when I began to see a book in the notes.

Sundays

I do not have a dog.

That turned out to be a problem, because one of the characters this book depends on is one.

My favourite place to run on a Sunday is Cubbon Park. Sometimes it is a run organised by a club or an NGO. Sometimes it is just me, there for the trees as much as for the run.

The dogs arrive with their people and form a gathering of their own: dogs of every breed you could name, groomed, leashed, and pleased with themselves.

And at the edge of it, almost always, a stray.

The day care

What I noticed first, and then could not stop noticing, is that a dog with its people is one animal and the same dog without them is another.

Cubbon Park only ever showed me the first. Everybody there had arrived with somebody. To watch the second I needed to be somewhere the people left.

There is a pet day care near where I live, with a play area you can see from the road. For months I drove my daughter there to watch the dogs. She was two.

I would park in front of the play area and roll the windows down. She sat on my wife’s lap and the two of them watched dogs of every breed in the place tear around together, while I went over to pet them.

That was her arrangement, not mine. She wanted me out there among them, and she wanted to watch me do it. She laughed at every bark that made me flinch, and a dog rising onto its hind legs was the funniest thing she had ever seen.

So I did, for months. I played with them. I talked to the people dropping theirs off, who will tell you things about their dog they would never tell you about themselves.

We were watching the same dogs, and I am fairly sure she was the better observer.

I wanted to understand how a dog waits. How long it will hold a door with its eyes. What it makes of a bag being packed. The difference between a tail that is pleased and a tail that is checking.

So most of it was drop-off and pick-up. Which dogs settled the moment the car pulled away and which never settled at all. Which ones gave the gate ten minutes and which gave it an hour. And then, in the evening, what the sound of the right car does to an animal with no way of being told how long it has been.

The rest of it I had to ask about, because it is not something you can stand at a fence and watch: what a dog notices when the person it depends on begins to depend on it.

Brownie

The one that mattered most I did not have to go anywhere to find.

Brownie is a rescued Indie who lives in my building. Brown, scruffy, shy, and frightened of a good deal of the world. She and I kept meeting in the lift, which is not a generous place to be frightened in. A small box, a stranger, nowhere to go, and about twenty seconds of it.

What I watched, over and over, was a dog deciding. Not deciding to trust me. Deciding whether today was a day when that was possible at all.

And then one day, somewhere between two floors, she put her paw in my hand.

That was the day happily (n)ever after got Goldie, my favourite character.

Brownie is not in the book. She gave me those twenty seconds, and what a dog can do with them.

The people, a piece at a time

The characters did not arrive whole. They accumulated. A way of standing. What they are like about money. What they do with their hands when they are lying. One trait at a time, across years, until there was enough of a person there to argue with.

Then the names, and they were the hardest part of the whole book. Harder than the plot. Harder than the ending.

A name has to sound like something a family would actually have chosen, in that year, in that city, and it then has to survive being read a thousand times by somebody who is only half paying attention. I went through more of them than I want to count.

Only once the names held could I finish the dossiers. Everything I know about these people, most of which the novel never uses.

It is not wasted. It is the difference between a character who behaves consistently because I remembered to make them, and one who behaves consistently because there was nothing else they could have done.

The spine, and the two books that became one

With the people settled, I could finally see the book’s spine: the load-bearing moments, in the order a reader needs them.

For a long time that spine was two novels. Part A and Part B. I had them mapped out that way and I was fairly certain about it.

I was wrong, and it took me an embarrassingly long while to see it. The break I had planned between them was not a real break. It was simply the place where I had run out of energy. Once I stopped defending the split, the two halves turned out to be one book that had been holding its breath in the middle.

I write at the end of the day, when everything that has to be done is done. Six years of that is a lot of last hours. I had mistaken my own exhaustion for a break in the story.

The names again, at the worst possible moment

The manuscript first went out to ARC readers carrying two names I had chosen years earlier and never questioned. Reading it back through somebody else’s eyes, I knew they were wrong.

So I changed them, late, at exactly the point when changing anything is most annoying.

What the six years were actually for

The seed was planted in June 2020. The book was published on 28 June 2026.

At the start, I assumed drafting would take most of the time. In fact, the years went into the work readers never see. Finding out that a scene I loved was doing no work. Discovering that two characters were the same person and one of them had to go. Standing in a park, learning how a dog waits.

I kept returning to people who are easy to overlook, and to what they do rather than what they say. It took me six years to see the pattern.

happily (n)ever after is out now. The book is here.