Here's a jokey exchange from Facebook the other day....

<strong>James Gracie</strong> Damn you. You had me up until 3am reading <em>The Villa of Mysteries</em>. Just had to finish it.

<strong>Me</strong> Well if it's any consolation I wrote that eight years ago and barely remember it myself. I am thereby absolved of all blame.

I'm sure everyone thought... yeah, right. But it's true honestly. And I think it's true for lots of authors too. We have a very strange relationship with our past work. They're ships or lost lovers that passed in the night. Once they're gone, they're gone. You remember their names but not an awful lot more.

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This is one reason why I frequently struggle when readers come up to me at an event and ask questions about something I wrote five or six years ago -- or eight, in the case of <em>The Villa of Mysteries.</em> It's not just that the detail of the book is missing. It's the context -- the why it got written.

Why is this? I suspect because in order to write a new book it's important to clear your head of everything that gets in the way. That includes the thing you've just turned out. Yes, if it's a series it's vital to maintain continuity -- how people look, act, speak. But that's something for the book diary (you are keeping one, aren’t you?).

The past book itself has to go. It wasn't like that in the early days. I used to agonise over the things -- what should I have changed, how could I have made it better? Now I'm old enough to realise that's pointless. On very rare occasions you get a chance to take a second look at a book when it comes back into print ages later -- I'm doing that with <em>Death in Seville</em> which will be substantially rewritten from the original <em>Semana Santa</em> when it reappears in November.

But mostly writers live in the present. The only work that matters is the one you're writing (except when you go on the road and have to talk about something you've probably already forgotten).

So glad you liked that old book of mine, James. But I meant it. I can't remember it much at all. And I am therefore absolved of all blame for your sleepless night, though I'd quite like the credit if that's OK.