Here's some news. I'm writing a new book. It's not Nic Costa. It's not set in Rome. And it's not really a new book at all. It's an old book, the first one I ever got published, back in 1996. Then it was called <em>Semana Santa.</em> When it comes out late next year it will have a different title and it will be a different book too.

I'm being offered something writers rarely get. A second chance to reimagine an earlier work. The book that comes out in a year or so will have the bare bones of <em>Semana Santa</em>. But it'll be a different, new story too, a better book I hope because this was my first and I think I've learned a lot since then. So I'm going to shake the whole work down and build it up again from scratch. Why? Because I can, because I think it'll be fun, and, most of all, I think I can make it a much better book.

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Authors rarely rewrite their earlier work. Mostly, I guess, because we don't have the opportunity. I never regard any book as 'complete' when it appears. Only 'as good as I can make it at the time'. I'd rewrite everything if I could, including the books that are in the pipeline already. That's just not practical. But it doesn't alter the fact that all books are unfinished works. <!--more--> I think it was Michelangelo who said something along the lines, 'Art is never completed, merely abandoned.' Dead right.

When you're as old as I am though -- <em>Semana Santa</em> was published fourteen years ago, remember, and written two years before that -- opportunities sometimes come along.

Last year Macmillan in the UK republished my fifth book, <em>Lucifer's Shadow</em>, under a new title, <em>The Cemetery of Secrets.</em> That's pretty much the same book that appeared briefly in the UK in 2000. It's proved a huge success so we started talking about bringing back <em>Semana Santa</em> too. It's a dark Mediterranean story that fits in very well alongside the Costa stories.

Fine, I said, so long as I can rewrite it. Not a few tweaks. Not a couple of passages here and there. A wholesale reworking of the book from top to bottom. The old book and a new one inside the same skin. I'm enthralled to tell you that’s what's going to happen and why I've been in Seville these last few days, working on the rewrite, rediscovering the city where most people think, erroneously, <em>Semana Santa</em> was set (and where the movie was shot too).

I know a fair number of you who turn up here these days are budding writers and fellow authors. So indulge me a little. This week I'd like to set down the process that led to <em>Semana Santa</em> in the first place, some of the challenges I want to address in rewriting for today, and a few hard facts about the book-writing process I've learned along the way. Writing is a journey of discovery inside and outside the books one produces. I'm very fortunate to be offered such an intriguing opportunity and perhaps by setting down some of the issues involved here I'll help myself do a better job.

Let me begin tomorrow with the curious sequence of coincidences that resulted in my becoming an author in the first place, and the crucial role that the lovely city of Seville played in that process. And for those of you who went out and bought <em>The Cemetery of Secrets</em> a special thanks, because the success of that reissue has certainly helped make all this possible.