It's been 20 years since I first began work on "Carolan's Concerto" a novel about the legendary, blind, 17th century Irish harper, Turlough O'Carolan.
It's entirely made up from all the stories and legends I heard about Carolan when I was travelling through Ireland in the early 1980's. Many of those stories had been passed down by word of mouth and never written down before. His encounters with the Sidhe or the Good People ( who the English refer to as the Faeries ) are central to the stories he told about himself and his remarkable abilities at musical composition.
My literary agent at the time didn't like the novel at all mainly because she was an Anglophile who didn't have any time for Irish music or Irish culture. She reckoned no one would be interested in the story of a "disabled" musician either.
I pushed ahead but she pressured me into changing quite a few things to make the novel more "popular" and "mainstream". None of her revisions really worked for me. I guess that's when I decided that one day I'd publish my books the way I wanted them to be done without interference from number-crunchers or petty fashionistas.
So, I've just spent the last little while or so restoring all the stuff that was cut out and reworking the whole story. I've still got a week or so to go before I publish the new book on Kindle. And I'm really enjoying this process. Yes, there's been interest in the film rights but I'm holding out for now until the right producer comes along.
The new novel will be called "Concerto for Harp or King Of The Blind" so as not to confuse it with the first version.

If you've never heard his music a quick google search of his name will yield hundreds of thousands of results.