Preparation

I'm writing this behind metaphorical shutters, while an imaginary team of decorators, joiners and electricians bustle around the site, running paintbrushes along the borders of text boxes and images and making sure all the links connect up as they're supposed to.

It's a week before the formal launch of this website, and many things are happening. I still don't have a formal logo, but that, I'm promised by our resident art genius, is on its way. The main reason for this site's existence is a book called 'How Soon Is Now?', which isn't out until June - but which will see its breathtakingly fabulous cover revealed in just one week. Hence the hustle to get this website up, running and possibly even pirouetting.

All this activity is to support The Book, because it's something I'm very proud of. 'How Soon Is Now?' is the product of several years' worth of work and imagination. It's a book full of stories, people and Big Ideas, many of which still surprise me. I've written one-and-a-quarter further books since it was completed, so there are times when it feels like it was written by someone else entirely. I'll look over a scene, a page, a paragraph and wonder where they came from, and who made all the ideas and words link up so nicely.

After 10 or 11 full revisions, I'm still a bit in love with this book, so that's a good sign, isn't it? Now it's preparing for the scary part where it goes off into the world and meets the imaginations of other people. I hope a few of them find something to enjoy in it. I hope all the work on this website will give it a nice little base from which to fly off and out into the wider world, where its readers are waiting.

Not long now.