Radio Ga Ga

Writing's a funny pastime.  You'd think all types (if you'll forgive the pun) of story would be the same, but it doesn't work like that.  At least, it doesn't for me.  Some come out as prose, others don't want to work that way and insist on attempting to be drama, and some are amenable enough to let me try them out in different ways.

A confession: I have had a lifelong love affair with the spoken word.  As a child I listened to my favourite stories over and over again on LP and cassette (oh, just google them, young people, I'm not going to digress now).  I spent teenage illnesses in bed listening to Journey Into Space (a repeat, I hasten to add - I'm not quite that old).  And had BBC Radio 7 (now Radio 4 Extra) not launched when it did, I'd have finished my thesis a year earlier instead of losing hours pretending to study simulation results while listening agog to Fatherland and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, headphones clamped over my unkempt studenty hair.  Which is why, despite its stubborn refusal to turn into anything coherent, I have persisted with the Difficult Second Novel.  It may not be working as a book, went my reasoning, but perhaps it would work for radio.  Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to tell the story in the wrong way.

So I'd poke and I'd prod and I'd try to work out the casting and play it in my head and still the damn thing wouldn't come.  And then last night I pulled at the threads again after a gap of nearly a year, expecting the knots to bite harder, becoming more intractable and impossible to resolve than ever, only this time I tugged from a slightly different angle and suddenly there I was, standing in a windswept garden near midnight (I'm not being poetical, I was out in all that rotten weather) with an armful of yarn that needs knitting into a workable narrative (yeah, that was the poetic bit).  And I think it's going to be a novel after all, not a radio play.

Which is a Good Thing, of course, but I've been so set on hearing this one rather than reading it that I'll have to get it published, just so I can have it as an audiobook.  Can I have Anton Lesser reading it, please?