My first novel, Fluids, is set in 2000 and begins on 1st January.
2000 and the years leading up to it were an odd time – everyone seemed to think that something bigger than them was about to jump in and ruin everything. Unless you were preoccupied with your bank account defaulting to zero or the incineration of a thousand tins of beans, you were likely to expect an apocalyptic catastrophe any time soon, if not actually to wake up dead on New Year’s Day. So in the novel, someone wakes up dead on New Year’s Day, and the survivors spend their time trying not to be run over by forces outside their control.
Some other things that happened in and just before 2000 – the beginning of Friends Reunited and Big Brother, the first solar eclipse seen on the UK mainland in over 70 years, Sonique’s re-released single ‘It Feels So Good’ was number 1 in the UK chart for three weeks, most music was depressingly awful, the KLF planned to build ‘The People’s Pyramid’ out of recycled bricks, but more official and equally arbitrary millennial installations were built instead.
It will be strange waking up on 1st January 2010 and thinking it’s 10 years since the first page of my novel… (In terms of the events of the novel that is - it was actually written much more recently).
‘The Elastica Principle’ is now just over 36,000 words long and a first draft is in sight, maybe early next year. It’s a kind of ghost story and involves a dialect coach.
Bookmunch has listed what reviewers, including me, liked best in 2009.
Have a look at the tabs for an extract, more info on me and to see what people did on NYE 1999.
