Letting Go

I'm feeling very sad on the day I should be celebrating. The Gene Pool has now been published - the fifth and final novel in the Nirvana series - so I should be dancing, eh? Instead, my guts ache with a feeling that I've managed to identify as loss. I miss my Nirvanan family. I've lived with them for about 20 years and it's not just that they've gone off into the world, like your kids leaving home. I have to recognise that I'm never going to be sharing space with them again.

I'm handing them all over to you now. Please be gentle with them - though they're tough enough to kick back if you're not.

Oh, and if you want the full set you can buy all five for under a tenner from you know where.

Farewell to Nirvana

Drumroll...

On Thursday (18 July) I will be publishing The Gene Pool, the fifth and final novel in the Nirvana series. The first two, Nirvana Bites and Trading Tatiana, were originally published by Orion before being re-published by my Nirvana Publishing imprint, along with De Nada Nirvana and Me, John and a Bomb. 

I ought to have a mailing list. I should be sending round ARCs. I should have organised a blog tour. I ought to have set up advance orders. I should be BUILDING A BUZZ FFS. 

If you know me, it will come as no surprise that I've done none of these things. This blog post, and an update when the book is up on Amazon, is the limit for me. My utter crapness at self-promotion is legendary. I've come to terms with it, as I said a while back, at the end of my Facing the Fear post. Do as I say, not as I do, folks.

It’s odd to be publishing this final Nirvana novel and I have to admit to feeling bereft. Nirvana Bites was originally published in 2002. The Gene Pool was written over a decade ago (though it’s been recently edited). I’ve lived with these characters for about 20 years and now the time has come to share them with the world for the last time – and to let them go. 

When I began writing the lives of these people, I originally thought they would sustain a single novel. I had a two-book deal with Orion and when I started writing Trading Tatiana, focusing on a different main character narrator, my Nirvanan characters muscled their way back in, insisting they weren’t done yet. It was my agent who suggested I should continue writing their story, saying he thought they were ripe for a TV series. And so De Nada Nirvana was born – the first novel I’d written in third person, following the lives of the narrators from the first two novels: Jen in South London and Jo in Spain. In this novel, Jen was pregnant, and the members of the Nirvana Housing Co-op were all learning and growing, continuing to do so in Me, John and a Bomb, where Jo had returned to the co-op and Jen and Ali were by now the parents of twins.

I didn’t know it at the time, let alone intend it, but, looking back over the five novels, I can see there’s an overarching arc for all the main characters. The members of my Nirvanan family, having established the power of non-blood relationships, were now ready to concede that blood-ties also matter. While the plot of The Gene Pool revolves around local government corruption, by the end of it, one thing was clear to me: my Nirvanans had grown up.

Although, theoretically, each of the novels can stand alone, my hope is that readers will have bonded with my Nirvana family over the whole series. They’re still out there somewhere, living their lives, but my time with them is done.

I'd love to release them as paperbacks eventually but, for the time being, they're e-book only. And just think about this: after Thursday, you will be able to buy all five books for less than a tenner. That can't be bad, eh? Check 'em out here.