For some months, I've been working on my second novel for Orbit Books. It's going great now, thanks for asking, but in the early days the book hurled some alarming curveballs right at my face, because that's what books do.

Smoke grenades led me staggering down blind alleys of narrative. Characters who had once seemed integral to the story, actually needed to be winched clean out of the manuscript forever, taking many thousands of words with them. Ideas that had once seemed great in my head, ac...