Good morning! It’s been a while . . .

Lately I have been busy banging away at drafts of my new novel. Written over six weeks in August to September last year, with every line since edited and re-edited, and then edited again, there was one thing that I simply couldn’t settle upon: a title.

Rewinding, it was just under ten years ago that I first had the idea for this story, but was not satisfied by the ending. Last summer the story popped into my head again, and the ending was there, just out of the blue. This story always had an opening line, right from my very first notes, so all there was left to do was to fill in the bits between. And never have I enjoyed writing a story so much. But the title.

An early draft was read by a friend, and I was very happy with the feedback that I received. So I mentioned some of the titles that I had been working on while they were reading.

“Mmm. They’re okay. But you’ll end up going with the working title. It fits well.”

Titles have always come so easy. Some of my short stories started with nothing more than a title. There were now twenty-four alternatives to choose from. My favourite was ‘Streets of Trouble and Romance’ – a line from the story. But this novel is comic fiction; that sounded too serious, however much I liked it.

So I put the original working title back to use. And my friend was right: I loved it. No two words could better summarise the overreaching arch of the novel. Sometimes I guess you just can’t see what it’s been right in front of you all along.

Anyway, you probably could have just skipped right to the end. Here is a cover image that I mocked up for the grand, underwhelming, reveal . . .

Thank you to everyone who has contributed in helping with this project so far. I have never had such a close support group to work with, and it has been a blast. Now that I have a bit more time, I’ll try to be in touch a little sooner with some new blogs and stories. I look forward to revealing more about ‘Drunk Dad’, too. In the meantime, there are hidden references in the header image for you to have fun with – some more discreet than others.

Enjoy the sunshine : )