I finally feel as if Dreamrunner is behind me. The final proofs have been checked, the manuscript has been typeset and there’s nothing I can change now. I’m relieved. It was incredibly tough to write and I’m not keen to have to write something as big and untameable as a novel to a deadline again. I think even without the ‘interruptions’ of giving birth and caring for a newborn, the deadline would have pushed my writing into an uncomfortably tight space. When I compare the creative process behind this novel to that behind Breathing in Colour, I’m shocked by the difference. Breathing was a leisurely experiment into the impact of dream imagery on a novel: a perfect fiction-dreaming symbiosis. I somersaulted through synaesthesia descriptions, played with echoing imagery, incorporated my own lucid dream images into the book. It was fun!

          Writing Dreamrunner had its fun moments but at times they were overshadowed by stress. I’ve learned valuable lessons from writing under pressure though: I now know I can write when I’m nearly dropping with exhaustion. I know that I can write in the tiny, precious spaces in the day when my baby is napping (and she’s really not a big daytime sleeper). And I know I can plan a novel in a non-organic, non-dreamlike way, with a chapter-by-chapter plan and word-count goals. Phew! So now I’ve written two very different novels in two very different ways. It’ll be interesting to see how they compare. My editor asked if I was planning to write another novel this year… I’m not. It’s such a brilliant feeling to know I’m absolutely free to write whatever I want to write now; there are no grandes lignes to set up, no ‘voice’ to slot back into each time I pick up my pen. I can be whoever I want to be again.

          Here’s to writing freedom!

Writing to the end of Dreamrunner has coincided with a tragic case that has come to light in the UK, where a devoted husband, Brian Thomas, strangled his wife of 40 years while having a nightmare about youths breaking into the camper van they were sleeping in together. My heart goes out to this couple and their family. The fact that I’ve been exploring the impact of a similar situation in Dreamrunner means that I’m not only aware of this case of homocidal somnambulism but quite a few others besides; my main source book for the novel was Carlos Schenck’s excellent ‘Paradox Lost: Midnight in the Battleground of Sleep and Dreams’, which details many case studies, interviewing couples whose lives are affected by violent sleep disorders.

What is going on in a person’s psyche when they kill in a dream? What’s the symbolic meaning of responding to a perceived threat (in the Brian Thomas case, boy-racers in a carpark disturbed the couple’s sleep and prompted his nightmare about a break-in) with violence? I don’t have the answers, but I do have some thoughts about alternative ways of tackling violent sleep disorders other than just taking a course of pills which represses the condition without addressing the underlying cause, and I look at these other possibilities in my novel. Dreaming is powerful, sleep disorders are common, and in a state of automatism, where the mind is no longer in control of the body, terrible things can happen.

Parasomnias – sleep disorders – are coming more into the public eye, and this can only be a good thing for sufferers who often think they are losing their sanity until a doctor in the know is able to diagnose them. Dreams are all too often shrugged off as ethereal phantasmagoria, but when something this tragic happens in the ‘real’ world as a direct result of a dream, it becomes brutally apparent that the unconscious mind is a power to be reckoned with.

I’ve finally sent Dreamrunner to my editor, Emma Beswetherick, and my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, to see what they think and just got an email back from each of them saying they LOVE it – what a huge relief! Of course, there’ll be revisions to do but that’s OK, I can have a break from the novel over Christmas and then come back to it with a fresh eye and Emma’s editorial comments, and tie it up.

It’s been an uphill struggle completing the manuscript with a tiny baby to care for; a case of feeling as if my head is about to explode each time I sit down to write because I have to re-enter the entire novel and balance it all in my head: characters, plot-lines, motivations, consequences, red herrings, parallelisms… and my baby continually jerks me out of that feverish wrapping-up of things. Not that I’m complaining! I already can’t imagine life without my daughter, and motherhood just means that I have to learn new dance steps like novel-breastfeed-walk-in-the-park, or blow-raspberries-to-make-her-giggle-write-novel-scene-rock-her-to-sleep. It’s quite a fun game.

I have to say, though, I’m seriously thinking of writing short stories and poetry again rather than tackling a whole new novel, as it’s so much easier to write short pieces when there are distractions… as my agent once said, babies are the best time-wasters ever and the best grown-up toys!

Having said that, I already have an idea for another novel… J