In contrast to my first novel, this was designed to reflect the main character’s sole viewpoint, so was written in first-person narrative rather than third, but the tense was also changed from past to present, and the manner in which dialogue fitted into the surroundings words usually amended so that any commas were replaced by periods (full stops); the single exception to this later change occurred when something spoken was part of an internal thought, the rest of which remained unvoiced.

Thus a paragraph which would normally be written as :

“No,” she turned from him and approached the open window, looked across the bare expanse of the nearby park and tried to ignore the encroaching sense of isolation.

became :

“No.” I turn from him and approach the window, look across the bare expanse of the nearby park and try to ignore the encroaching sense of isolation.

Soon after beginning it I found to my surprise and delight that unlike all the hard work on A Question Of Energy, where plot elements needed to be introduced so characters had to do and say certain things, here it seemed at times as if I were on auto-pilot, though in the good sense of channelling something being described as it was revealed rather than writing by rote, for not only did characters end up saying things I had no original intent of, the entire story kept changing direction as if it were being observed, not created.

The basic outline of an alien and very powerful being arriving on our planet is beyond formulaic (though here amnesiac and in what is to them the unknown form of a young woman), and in many ways the entire story deals with nothing else but clichés, often deliberately so. As to whether or not there is any deeper meaning, if such can be applied at all, it could be anything from this list or more: a simple difference of perception between two people, regardless of gender; a stereotypical male/female misunderstanding; a girl’s awakening to womanhood and discovery of herself as a sexual being; or just an adventure story with lots of confusion on all sides (including mine, probably).

As with any early work there is still a lot wrong with it, but I would hope the good points outweigh the bad, as I was still learning characterisation.