I finished the first draft of The Door in the Mountain: the Redoorening (working title) three weeks ago today. Peter read it (typing comments whilst I sat beside him, writhing and sometimes squeaking); my editor will read it closer to the end of the month. And already I’m wondering—and already people are asking—what’ll be next. It’s like when Emma was writhing and sometimes squeaking, only weeks old, in the centre of some adoring crowd of friends and/or family: someone would say, “So—you thinking about the next one at all?” Then and now, re: procreation and creation, my answer is a muddled, at best: “How dare you! I’m not thinking about the next one at all! Except that I kind of am, because this was a huge deal, and I did it, and I feel exhausted and triumphant, and I know I want to do it again. Oh dear.”

So. Once the edits are done, whenever that might be, what will be next?

Here’s a stab at a list.

1. Louis Riel. The vast horribleness of an insane asylum in Quebec. A nearby manor house, once lived in by the man who would become Queen Victoria’s father. Madness and secrets and danger.
2. Present-day Liberty Village in west-end Toronto. A woman. A townhouse. Long-ago Liberty Village, which spits up the ghost of a man who was an inmate in the vast horribleness that was the Toronto Prison. Lust and secrets and danger.
3. Persephone. The same world as Ariadne and Chara’s: godmarks and familiar-but-reimagined mythic territory.

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