It's a truism that nothing you write will ever be entirely done - there'll always be another draft, proofs, copy edits, crying over missed typos when you finally hold the finished article in your hands - and its another truism that I have a bad habit of declaring things finished at every opportunity, even when they're clearly not. Nevertheless: as of last weekend, my fourth novel To End All Wars is effectively complete.
That's to say, I've done three drafts, I'm happy with it, it's as good as I feel I can get it. Which means, from my point of view, that it's good enough to finally get packed off to my agents, Zeno, and of course I'm desperately hoping that in the longer term it will be good enough that someone will throw money my way for the privilege of unleashing it upon the world.
I've come to think - and it took me a while to get to this realization, obvious though it sounds - that you should write the books you want to read. I mean, it is obvious, right? But perhaps it takes a certain amount of learning to get to a point where it feels comfortable, and to figure out exactly what it is you want to read and how exactly you get to go about producing that. At any rate, I'd like to hope that that's what I did with the Tales of Damasco, but I'm really confident it's what I've done with To End All Wars. It brings together a whole lot of genres and influences and themes that I find interesting and then tangles them up amidst a setting I'm completely fascinated by: the First World War, but more specifically, the wider context of that period when Edwardian values were abruptly, transformingly assaulted by the horrible reality of industrialized warfare.
And if that sounds a bit bleak and serious then I should probably emphasize just how much other stuff has gone into the mix, from adventure novels to a host of classic (and some more obscure) science fiction influences, to period dramas and country house mysteries, to stoic philosophy to ...well, you get the idea. Or perhaps not. Because something else I wanted for To End All Wars was that it wouldn't easy to pin down; I like the idea of a novel that constantly adjusts its relationship with the reader, challenging what they think it is and where it might be going, and that was what I tried to write: a book where even the genre might change from chapter to chapter to keep pace with the story's twists and turns.
Anyway, I should probably not say any more, right? I mean, there's a lot of ground yet to cover; as with so much in the business of writing, this ending is only the beginning of the next phase. Suffice to say, I've finished my fourth novel, I'm pretty damn excited about the whole thing, and I feel like I've written a book I'd be glad to read if I wasn't the one who'd written it. That'll have to do for now!
That's to say, I've done three drafts, I'm happy with it, it's as good as I feel I can get it. Which means, from my point of view, that it's good enough to finally get packed off to my agents, Zeno, and of course I'm desperately hoping that in the longer term it will be good enough that someone will throw money my way for the privilege of unleashing it upon the world.
I've come to think - and it took me a while to get to this realization, obvious though it sounds - that you should write the books you want to read. I mean, it is obvious, right? But perhaps it takes a certain amount of learning to get to a point where it feels comfortable, and to figure out exactly what it is you want to read and how exactly you get to go about producing that. At any rate, I'd like to hope that that's what I did with the Tales of Damasco, but I'm really confident it's what I've done with To End All Wars. It brings together a whole lot of genres and influences and themes that I find interesting and then tangles them up amidst a setting I'm completely fascinated by: the First World War, but more specifically, the wider context of that period when Edwardian values were abruptly, transformingly assaulted by the horrible reality of industrialized warfare.
And if that sounds a bit bleak and serious then I should probably emphasize just how much other stuff has gone into the mix, from adventure novels to a host of classic (and some more obscure) science fiction influences, to period dramas and country house mysteries, to stoic philosophy to ...well, you get the idea. Or perhaps not. Because something else I wanted for To End All Wars was that it wouldn't easy to pin down; I like the idea of a novel that constantly adjusts its relationship with the reader, challenging what they think it is and where it might be going, and that was what I tried to write: a book where even the genre might change from chapter to chapter to keep pace with the story's twists and turns.
Anyway, I should probably not say any more, right? I mean, there's a lot of ground yet to cover; as with so much in the business of writing, this ending is only the beginning of the next phase. Suffice to say, I've finished my fourth novel, I'm pretty damn excited about the whole thing, and I feel like I've written a book I'd be glad to read if I wasn't the one who'd written it. That'll have to do for now!
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