A girl sits in a university bedroom, typing. She’s been out for a meal with her friends, and talked things over, and suddenly her planning have coalesced into concrete inspiration. The first chapter of the novel is about to take shape.

This story will be full of the imagined, fantastic, bizarre, yet tied closely to reality and experience. The physicality of the Old Town as she’s wandered it with Mags, and the experience (not physical, hard to describe, but she’s trying) that comes with the dreams she has journeyed through; how they differ, and how they relate.

The city that envelops us, the forest that hides from view. Different qualities of hardness and softness, light and shade. The different quality a conversation with a friend has in a different kind of space. Thinking while walking, talking while walking, or while staying still.

What we’re walking towards, and away from. Why we escape, and how we can avoid simply escaping. How we can bring dream back outside ourselves, enchant the waking world, change it. And the problems with the waking world that so deeply need changing.

This isn’t just her work. She’s discussed, shared ideas, got encouragement and inspiration from her friends. There’s an old dream that’s linked to theirs through curious threads, that she glimpsed by chance in her wonderings. It’s given some shape to the themes she’s exploring, but so, more so, has the lives and dreams of her and her friends.

Ash’s hand and mind work in tandem, her night-journeys and her day-meetings melding into story. Dream and reality melded, inseparable, one. A grand resolving of contradictions that opens a bright, winding road ahead of her, and, she hopes, her readers.

‘This is how the story begins…’