If the image above looks familiar, that’s because it is the source of the cover art for the novel. Taken in June 2008, it pictures a valley leading south-east down from the top of Lochnagar, a 1155m peak in the Grampian Mountain range in north-eastern Scotland; out of sight beyond the end is Loch Muick.

It wasn’t just for the aesthetics of the picture that I chose it as a starting point for the cover. The very landscape around that peak was the inspiration for the secluded valley in which Drummoch had his hut. However, apart from the existence of loch Muick to the south-east, and the fact that the nearest large centre of population, Aberdeen, is on the coast roughly 70 kilometres to the east, there isn’t intended to be a correspondence between Drummoch’s land and the real world.

Five years after the picture was taken, in early June 2013, I was walking around Loch Muick on a pleasant summer’s day. It was a Thursday, the schools were still in, so the place was quiet, but by no means deserted. Since the spring of that year, I’d been knocking around an idea for a novel, but I was having trouble finding the momentum to progress with it. I liked the ideas and characters I’d come up with, but I couldn’t find the hook in it to really grab my interest. It going to be a straight fiction (not sci-fi) novel, which centred on the power of belief. Some of the central ideas, and even some of the character’s traits, eventually found a home within the two Ark books.

On that Thursday, as I trekked the eleven kilometres around the loch, only exchanging hellos with a handful of other walkers, I couldn’t help but dwell on the seclusion of the place. But it was more than that, and I imagined what it would be like not just to be alone in the beautiful Scottish countryside, but on an entire world bereft of anyone else. On the deserted path, the prospect felt so close that I couldn’t avoid the inevitable questions of how such a thing could occur, and what it would be like to be that alone. Even before I’d returned to the car park, I had the starting premise for the novel. The story of a man, lost to himself and extremely long-lived, if not in fact immortal, existing far after everyone else had died or left.

By the middle of September, I had nearly 86,000 words and the first solid version complete, and I sent out copies for review. However, before I had the chance to do any further revisions, another idea took hold of me and just wouldn’t let go. The Ceremony of Mercy had to wait for a while, as the Ark story forced its way onto paper. In a little over three months, I wrote the two volumes out longhand, and then transcribed both onto computer (more of this in the background to the Ark Series).

In late January 2014, armed with plentiful feedback, not to mention the experience of writing roughly 170,000 words about a completely unrelated story, I set about revising the Ceremony of Mercy. Although I did add approximately 6,000 words, the majority merely fleshed out various scenes that I’d unintentionally left rather sketchy. In mid March, after numerous further minor revisions,  the novel was released.

The working title for the novel was “The Man in the Yellow Vest”. It wasn’t terrible, and it did the job, so I didn’t spend much time thinking up a better one. However, after the first longhand draft, whilst I was transcribing to computer, I added the two chapters cataloguing events in Rosalind’s and the City’s past. The final scene was Rosalind’s first-hand experience of a Mercy Ceremony. As I was trying to think of a name for the chapter which followed on from it (the final of the book,  although it was subsequently split into two separate ones), I couldn’t help being drawn to the fact that everyone had been through the Mercy Ceremony apart from Drummoch. Whatever the truth, whether it disintegrated or merely displaced the recipients, it did provide an ending and salvation of sorts. I felt that Drummoch ought to get his own Mercy Ceremony, even if not in a literal sense. Hence I named the final chapter, “The Ceremony of Mercy”, to reflect that he does achieve his own ending of sorts. As soon as I’d written it down though, it struck me as the perfect title for the entire novel. After all, the story is ultimately about the process by which he transcends his past.