This book was dragged from me kicking and screaming. I loved the idea of the drowned town, wanted to work with the images it suggested, but really struggled to find the story, to find a narrative spine to hang my ideas on, if you like. There were many, many revisions. Even when I had 'finished', I didn't think it was really working, so I didn't send it out. I sat on it for ages. Then finally I thought, well, it's silly not to at least see what my editor thinks. So I sent it off. And they bought it. And I had a conversation with my incredible editor in which she really encouraged me to push to make the story deeper, to reach for what it could be. And I rewrote it again. I moved things around. I put things in. I took them out. I smashed things up so I could piece them back together (read the book; you'll know what I'm talking about). So there are many, many, deleted scenes. The problem is that none of them are really intact as scenes. I harvested them for parts over the course of the revisions.

I did, however, have my usual trouble with the ending. I've written elsewhere about how I love writing endings so I tend to write lots of them - far too many little scenes, giving every character their own little moment rather than really focusing on what's important.

So what I can offer you here is the ending for Dad, which was completely, and rightly, expunged from the final draft, but to which I still have a sentimental attachment, because as weird as those heads might be, I really love them and wish them all the best. And I guess I also want to believe that even people with the weirdest of artistic visions might eventually find their place in the world (in fact, I'm counting on it...).

**The usual warnings apply. There are spoilers in this scene. DON'T READ IT unless you've already finished the book (unless you have no interest in doing so, in which case i) what are you doing here? and ii) go for it.)

And Dad?

Dad wasn’t saying anything much.

He was too busy making Atlantis heads.

That’s what the papers were calling them.

With the water level dropping and them dredging the lake and all the people swimming up here now that they’d remembered how cool and clear and bandaid-free it was and had stopped caring about the Finkle-signs, all kinds of things were being stirred up from the bottom.

Including Dad’s early air-bubble heads. They were coming up one by one, bobbing to the surface like relics from a lost world.

When they first started appearing, there was a journalist up at the lake. A few of them had hung around for a while, sniffing for stories about the funny little town with the vibrant arts culture and the criminal mayor and the crazy girl who swam out into the almost-flood in her best clothes.

Atlantis Heads, he wrote. Creatures From the Deep.

Before long, orders were flooding in. People were sending photos of themselves and begging Dad to capture their essence.

Impressionist, they were calling them.

Which means kind of looking like something but also kind of not.

Dad’s artistic vision had turned out to be cutting edge and fashionable after all.