For the first time since I started this book, I am writing scenes out of order. I finished with 70,000 words after this new draft, and it needed plumping up. I made a list of problems with the draft, and possible scenes that could be written to rectify them. It was an interesting exercise, trying to refer back to scenes and plot lines that had been deleted, looking for a way of revitalising them.

There were old ideas, locations and characters that had to be axed because they didn’t serve the new version of the story, and there was a part of me that was keen to help them fit back in, alongside new, sparkly ideas. The process has been a lot like working on a patchwork quilt, toiling away trying to stitch things together.

The image above is taken from my much-loved copy of Joan Aiken’s wonderful children’s story collection ‘The Necklace of Raindrops’. It was the book that made me want to be a writer, and I will always be thankful to the author for introducing me to the great depths of the human imagination.

My favourite story is named ‘The Patchwork Quilt’. It concerns a grandmother and grandson living together in the ‘far north’, where the grandmother is making the quilt for her grandson Nils’s birthday. The quilt, of course, is no ordinary quilt, and it attracts the attention of a greedy wizard, who steals it to use as a magic carpet.

The quilt is made from ‘more than a thousand stars’, and is Granny’s great passion project. I try to bear this in mind as I keep ‘quilting’ away with my book, searching for more ‘stars’ to add the story. Some evolve from stars that are old friends, some are new stars that I sew painstakingly together. I hope that at the end of it I will have something approximating a quilt of many colours, with more than a little bit of magic stitched in.