Well, that's it. Apart from a little editing, 'Gone Away, Gone Ahead' is now finished. I was tempted to extend the number of chapters, to keep it going a while longer, but I realised that the story I had originally planned had reached its natural stopping point.

I'm not someone who plans out a story in great detail. I know what needs to happen and roughly where it's going to happen, but sometimes the characters start taking me down other paths and bring in more twists and turns on the journey. I'm usually two or three chapters ahead of posting, which allows for flexibility and changes. Sometimes a suggestion that someone has come up with in their comments makes me stop and think, ‘Hang on. What if I try putting that in. Will it work?’ Sometimes it does, sometimes not, but it’s good because it makes me write a scene in a different way than I may have first envisioned it.

I’m still working on the prequel, ‘Threadfall’ and although the end is very much pre-determined in that story, getting to it is going be interesting. If I was the sort of author who does plan things out, then I should have written that one first, but it wasn't until I'd written about 15 chapters of ‘Gone Away, Gone Ahead’ that I had the idea to fill in some more of the back story on characters in the main work.

At the moment, I'm having ideas about some of the minor characters and it may well be that their story is where the next part will begin. But my own life is about to undergo upheaval in the next month or so as I move from the house I’ve lived in for 21 years to start a new life with my husband. There will be lots of work to do, hence less time for writing, although I do find that when you are decorating, or gardening, ideas often ferment as your mind is free to wander. 
I like to be able to post updates on a regular basis, so unless I know I’m going to be able to have the time to do that, I'd rather not start at all. 
What I may do instead, is to re-format and tweak a totally different story I wrote for Nanowrimo several years ago - a supernatural mystery based in an old 1930’s cinema. That would be far less work and I think people might enjoy reading it, even though it's a totally different genre.