Warning: Contains Spoilers

I finished my first book about fifteen years ago and put it to one side because I knew it didn't really work but wasn't sure why. It's called The Changeling Tree and I originally thought it was a series of five books for children and then decided it should be one long book for adults. For obvious reasons, that was part of the reason why it didn't work: it didn't know who it was written for.

The second issue was that it took too long to get going, so I cut out large chunks of back-story. I don't think I could have done this when I first wrote it, because I got attached to some of the characters, but the passage of time makes it possible to be more ruthless.

If you've read it, you might be interested to know what that involved. Alison and Mike left Leicester for London and I've cut out a whole family of next-door neighbours there. Linda (an overly house-proud uber-mother) and Warwick (a surgeon) became friends with Alison and Mike when Rose was a baby and Linda was expecting her daughter, Chloe, who became Rose's best friend. Chloe had an irritating little brother called Ollie and an aunt called Sue, who all had to go, apart from Chloe, who remained as an off-stage character. Their main function in the narrative was to give Rose somewhere to live when Alison first went into hospital. There were several hospital visits and it eventually emerged that Linda and her family were moving nearer to a better school and wouldn't have room for Rose in their new house. Finally, after all of that, she went to her Gran's in Leicester and the actual story started.

It all seemed necessary when I wrote it, but it didn't move the story on. I was trying to establish Rose's everyday life before everything changed, but her normal life wasn't going to grab readers' attention and it wasn't representative of the rest of the book. Once that was all gone, I was left with a much cleaner introduction to the story and I was able to give Mike's parents a bit more to do. Originally, it was Brian who died, but too many of my characters were female, so Shirley had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The third problem was that Alison and Rose were too good to be true, both as individuals and as a mother-daughter relationship. The story was largely told from Rose's viewpoint, but Rose wasn't in control of her changing circumstances, so she was too passive to be interesting. Alison's situation is more interesting, so I need to find a way to explore her viewpoint more.

I also decided to keep Alison living in Leicester while Rose was growing up. Moving everyone back and forth was too complicated and I realised it was more unsettling that she'd lost touch with her mother despite living in the same city.

Having made those decisions, I still felt like I needed a dramatic hook at the beginning of the human storyline, and that's where Mike's discovery of baby Rose came in. The problem then was whether to jump to the main storyline or chart the years in between. In the end, I decided to show Rose growing up through a series of fairy stories, which I hope are fun to read, but they'll also take on greater significance later. They're essentially a series of character sketches, which I hope give a sense of who the main characters are and how they get on with each other. In the context of The Changeling Tree, they also allowed me to cover Alison's studies, the breakdown of her relationship with Mike, her attempts to prepare Rose for what's to come, Shirley's death, Rose's relationship with Brian, and Rose's desire for greater independence as she becomes a teenager.