I read The Anomaly, by Herve Le Tellier, while on holiday recently, and thoroughly enjoyed it. A thought-provoking piece of lightly-sci-fi, with a very large cast of characters, that takes its time in revealing what it's actually about and where its story is going to lead. I rated it 5 stars on Goodreads, and it's not too often I hand out top marks to a book!

The book also resonated with me for other reasons. Back in the 1990s, when I was writing furiously and trying all different kinds of genres, I wrote a HUGE, crazily ambitious sci-fi one-off, with a massive cast, spread across the space of a few hundred years, which demanded an awful lot of readers, in terms of asking them to make connections between the characters in the different time periods and drawing all the various, seemingly random strands together inside their own imaginations to weave them into a complete, carefully structured, interconnected tale. It ran to more than 205,000 words, and baffled and bored the few people who I shared the first draft with at the time. In retrospect, I shouldn't have shared it with anyone until I'd edited it a few times and knocked it more into shape -- I'm sure it's incredibly lumpy and overly wordy as it stands.

Although much of the novel is a mystery to me -- I haven't even looked at it since I finished work on the first draft a quarter or a century or so ago -- I've never forgotten about it, and it's always been in line for a heavy rewrite and lots of editing and eventual release, unlike some of the other first draft books I knocked out back then. I thought it might be one of the first Darren Dash books that I'd turn to, but I've been running scared of it, knowing hjow big it is and how much work I'll have to put into whittling it down and making it more of a fun read (while still demanding an awful lot from my readers).

But The Anomaly has convinced me that such a story CAN work, and that featuring a large cast, where the connections between them only gradually reveal themselves, doesn't have to be as off-putting as I feared. It's got me excited about the book again, and while I'm not saying it's definitely going to be the next Darren Dash book that I release -- I quite like the fact that I haven't released two books in a row in the same genre under my Darren Dash handle, and as I'm sure most of you already know, the book coming out later this year is sci-fi -- I don't think its day in the moonlight lies TOO far off in the future...

Watch this space!!