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Visitations of the Muse are strange and unpredictable events; Stephen King, with characteristic delicacy, once compared the process to a gremlin evacuating its bowels on his head. I am usually able to complete at least one new book each year; but last year's belated release, for all its moral and philosophical bite, was a recycling of already-published material. This March I started something new, without the encumbrance of a plan; by the end of June I had about twenty thousand words, but was stuck as to what happened next.

Then I saw this on Twitter (X be xxxxed):

It's an extract from a book on William Blake, who either saw visions or had hallucinations, depending on whom you believe; and my personal gremlin went YEEEEE-HAH! and, to put it mildly, unloaded. Between 30 June and 16 August I wrote 27,696 words of first draft about a philosophy professor who sees crabs; and in keeping with the absurdity of the enterprise, on the morning when my print copy of the final version arrived a complete stranger sat near me on the tube and opened a copy of Adam Nicolson's Life Between the Tides to the beginning of the fourth chapter, which is titled Crabs. I haven't read Sartre except for his play The Flies, which I liked; but the coincidence would have appealed to Arthur Koestler, of whom I have read quite a bit and who didn't much like Sartre.

Anyway, not to clatter chitinously on, Seeing Crabs is now available in paperback and PDF ebook, and would make an ideal gift for that special crustacean-oriented someone in your life; and unlike Amazon I pay my taxes.