A long silence, but there was a reason for it. I've spent the past 18 months working on my new novel The Deer Wedding. What began with a chance visit to a Dalmatian island over twelve years ago with a theatre company intent on staging a play by Shakespeare on a beach with a cast of fishermen, refugees and drama students, has now mutated into a narrative set over two generations and two brutal wars. It also follows the controversial history of two very special paintings, one of which bears the title of the book.

My journey to Croatia took place just a couple of years after the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s; the economy was in freefall and Kosovo was turning into another potential hot spot. I had a slip of paper with a mobile number on it for a man called Igor, who was going to meet me on the island of Hvar. The tourist trade had begun to recover on the islands, but many places familiar to the backpackers of yesteryear were now home to refugees from the conflict. There were only too many signs of what had been, including the presence of UN personnel in cities like Zagreb. In the city bars, I met people my own age who had fought, or tried not to fight. I read Rebecca West's extraordinary book Black Lamb, Grey Falcon with a view to orientating myself in the complex, labyrinth history of this part of the world, but found myself going back to the future. So many debates of the late 1930s were still circling in the streets I was walking; the faded beauty of the Jewish cemetery in Split set me on the trail of the Italian community in Croatia, amongst them Vid Morpurgo who set up Europe's oldest bookshop back in the 1860's. (And yes, he is related in some way to Michael "War Horse" Morpurgo).

Two years after sending off a very early draft to the publishers Alcemi, The Deer Wedding is ready to launch. Thurs 30 September, in Cardiff's popular Cameo Club in Pontcanna. If you want to know more, visit www.deerwedding.com . There's a trailer to whet the appetite - filmed by award winning Welsh director DJ Evans - complete with a life sized crucifix we carried from Welsh National Opera's props warehouse to a derelict site in the old docks to film a landscape we hoped looked like city emerging from civil war. Let me know what you think! The book is available to buy from Amazon from the 30th.

What every writer dreams of, a beautiful space to write uninterrupted, and a small community of like-minded people to share ideas, inspirations, thoughts and dreams. This is what was on offer at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, where I've just spent the past month as a Fellow. At times, I felt like I was walking around on a film set, or had woken up in inside a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Hawthornden is built on a craggy rockface above the River Esk, its foundations a web of caves once the home of Picts (and Scottish outlaw William Wallace). Walking up to the castle gates to get a mobile signal early in the morning, I met with two curious red deer and a host of birds - thrushes and goldfinches and dozens of swifts (who were nesting in the crumbled castle wall just visible from my bedroom window). The days are your own to write, read or reflect, sometimes a combination of all three.My original plan was to draft a novel set in Croatia, but that project had to be brought forward to meeting a funding deadline, so a week before I headed to Scotland I needed to think up a new plan. I'd just heard that my short story Indigo's Mermaid is to be published in a European Fiction Anthology by Dalkeys Archive Press (USA) in January 2010. A while ago, an editor of literary magazine had advised me to think about using the same story as the basis for a novel. So, I gathered together a copy of my short story, a number of my favourite notebooks (bought from a lovely bookstore in Barcelona) and headed for the hills. My writing is usually shoe-horned into spare hours and weekends away from my day job in an opera house, based in Cardiff. I travel a lot with that job, and I also have new responsibilities heading up the digital media strategy, which so far has seen me sidetracked into scripting & co-directing short films. All fine and dandy, but the novels don't get written! Here was a chance to really put myself to the test: would the short story expand into a novel? Would the characters still come to life away from their original setting and confrontation point? The chance to return day after day to one project, to test things out, re-write, re-invent was invaluable. I even wrote a (very) rough first draft. If that's inspired you in turn, and you're a published writer visit http://www.transartists.nl/air/hawthornden_castle.4272.html for details on how to apply.The castle is set in the middle of nowhere but it's still only a short bus ride away to Edinburgh. This is a city I've only ever seen in the middle of its busy, crazy arts festival in the summer. To be able to take time to explore the place without being mobbed by hundreds of anxious theatre promoters was an experience in itself. I heard Willie Doherty talk about his provocative and stunning video films at the Fruitmarket Gallery (www.fruitmarket.co.uk), drank smoothies in Hulas near Grassmarket and spent happy hours in the evocative West Port Bookshop, crammed full of second hand books balanced precariously on wobbly wooden shelves. Don't miss the Moose Head sculpture, if you get to go. And yes, we did relent and made for The Elephant House, otherwise known as the cafe where one JK Rowling wrote her first novel about boy wizard Harry Potter. It's a great cafe and not a tourist trap in spite of that pedigree. (www.elephanthouse.biz).So, what's it like returning to the real world after living like an aristocrat in a castle? Well, Dalkey's publish the mini-version of Indigo's Mermaid next year. The editor is Aleksandar Hemon, the American Bosnian writer, so it should be an interesting anthology on many levels. And today, I learnt my mother's out of the acute ward in the cardiac unit in Brighton General - and my novel set in Croatia will be published by Alcemi in October 2010! Alcemi are involved with Left Coast Eisteddfod in Portland, so you can find out more about this brilliant publishing house in Wales by popping along to one of the events scheduled for August. More details can be found on AmeriCymru's website.Hwyl!

Walking into a white, light studio filled with paintings that layer real landscape with imagined places, or remembered places is quite an experience. Maggie's studio is part of the Bay Art complex in what was Cardiff's old docklands. The building is a warren of studios, reached by original staircases with worn stone steps and decorative railings. I rented its studio flat for a month to complete my novel The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum. Now, I'm seeing it from the artist's point of view.Outside, thunder, lightening and heavy rain; inside, a rich palette of colour, some of it worked on canvas, or on small squares of thick cardboard. Maggie has created variations on a theme, exploring two particular landscapes but she's not worked them up in a figurative fashion, but something more complex: layers on layers. I like the first painting I see, strong pinks breaking out from a sweep of green brushstrokes. These are claustrophobic spaces, which she says are influenced by old houses she's lived in and their overgrown gardens. Later pictures are linked through a series of motifs, a bird of prey, Scottish pines, bent tree branches and wayward grasses. The most recent pictures are painted in a much freer style and reflect an interest in breaking out of those enclosed spaces. Maggie's stuck; she has a large number of paintings and doesn't know whether to go back and re-work early pictures, or look to the future. I suggest she selects six key works and then creates short narratives around each, using drawings and works-in-progress as satellite pictures to accompany those. It's a bit like reaching the end of one novel, or short story and already having the seeds for the next idea pulling at your imagination. You can't be fully committed to fnishing the older piece, but it's too soon to start the new. She's excited by that idea and it's a move forwards.Back to the office, hopping through puddles. One shoe gets soaked, the other stays dry. Dropping into rehearsals for The Queen of Spades (www.wno.org.uk) where the puppeteers have started work with the singers. The bunraku puppets are extraordinary, the male puppet reflects the feature of its designer John MacFarlane; the female puppet is a dead ringer for Kate Moss. It takes at least 2 puppeteers to work them, each disguised by a black head wrap that makes them look like funereal beekeepers. They wear long black gloves, like old fashioned opera gloves, to minimise distraction as they fold and arrange the puppets' limbs. The Count smokes a cheroot - thanks to a clever device sewn into his torso. The puppeteers' have to have brilliant co-ordination as they must share tasks like shuffling cards, or counting out bank notes in the gambling house where the Countess meets her fate.Bay Art Gallery has a new exhibition, which I plan to visit when I can tear myself away from puppets and Tchaikovsky's wonderful music! (www.bayart.org.uk)