Sitting on the verandah of a beach house, looking over a tropical sea – with the sand, a silver sun, and a palm tree outside to give summer shade… Can there be any better place to start cutting a new book down to size?

I don’t know about you, but I always edit a manuscript as I go along. Most afternoons I’ll go through the morning’s writing, tightening things up … revising quite heavily as I finish each chapter – and substantially correct the text again when, as with the present book, I complete each of the three Parts.

Even so, the first draft came in at 145,000 words. It’s a long book – a saga spanning two generations of an Australian soldier-settler family. But as the .........

A fortnight ago I typed “The End” on the last computer screen page of my new historical novel about an Australian soldier-settler family. It’s a long book, spanning two generations. First War. Between the Wars. Second War. And it took a long time to finish.

In fact the last words were typed at 11.40 a.m. precisely three years, one month and four days since the first sentence fell from my fingers in October 2011. Given the commitment to such a big project, you tend to get pedantic – not to say obsessive about these things.

Now that the labour of composition is done, I’ll be sharing in this blog the many stages of the journey as we travel towards publication in mid-2016. I hope beginner writers will find .........