2014: Year One

I'm pretty certain I've never put as much weight of expectation on a year as I did 2014.

I mean, as the year when I gave up my old, safe career in IT for my new, hazardous career in professional Authoring, the pressure on these last twelve months has been absurd.  Almost all of it self-imposed, it has to be said, because everyone I know without exception has been completely supportive; but for my own sanity, I needed to know for sure that I had a chance of making this thing work and that I hadn't just driven my life off a cliff in some fit of self-delusion.  Not only that but my health, social life, home and pretty much everything else were in shabby condition indeed at the start of the year, and I wasn't about to let them stay that way for a day longer than I had to.

That basically left me fighting on three fronts.  I had to produce enough work, and enough of an increase over what I'd been able to do around a full-time day job, to feel like I'd done the right thing; I needed to try and sell some stuff if at all possible, since otherwise I'd be that bit closer to running out of money; and somewhere amidst all of that I needed to sort out basically all of the rest of my life.

I won't dwell too much on that last one, except to say that things are vastly better now than they were twelve months ago.  And number two, that's kind of tricky to quantify, so we'll come back to it.  But as for getting the work done, yeah, that's definitely been a success.  Frankly, I even shocked myself a bit.  After years of making grand plans only to have them sabotaged by cold, hard reality, it was easy to assume I was expecting far too much.  I wanted to get drafts down of three novels: World War One-set Sci-Fi novel To End All Wars, post-apocalyptic thriller (and part-rewrite of earlier project War For Funland) Degenerates and my first hesitant step into Crime writing, The Bad Neighbour.  On top of that, I wanted to finish a few short stories, comics and such, and I had a great deal of research to get through.  With all of that ahead, and however much it looked doable on paper, I couldn't but go in with the assumption that I was basically doomed to failure.

So to be sitting here with everything I wanted done done is a strange feeling.  Beyond the fact of having it all finished, and given that Degenerates ended up being such a strange hybrid of revamping and reinventing my unfinished second novel War For Funland, it's difficult to put an exact number on how much I wrote in 2014; but guesstimating that half of Degenerates was essentially new work, I'd say I've produced about 260'000 words of new novels, plus some 55'000 of shorter work over seven short stories, one comic and a novelette.  With the second draft of To End All Wars, two redrafts of my first novella Patchwerk and much polishing work on some of some older stories, I'd be surprised if I've done less than 200'000 words of editing on top of that.  All of which is heartening, because it means I can comfortably write and edit two novels a year, plus a few other bits and pieces, and I figure - based on little real evidence - that that's about what I need to be doing to make some kind of a living.

Which brings us neatly to the topic of selling things.  On that front, things were going appallingly until late in the year, and though I hadn't expected much (I had no novels to pitch, after all) I'd still hoped to do much better off short fiction than I did.  That never entirely turned around, but a few other things - arguably much more exciting things - did come together in the eleventh hour.

First up, I have a buyer agreed for Patchwerk.  I can't say who yet, but I can say that they were my absolutely first choice and are a publisher I'm hugely excited to be working with.  Both of which are also true for my graphic novel C21st Gods, which went from a long-talked about dream project between myself and artist Duncan Kay to a concrete reality, by such a bizarre chain of events that it's a story in itself, and one I'll probably share here in the not-too-distant future.  Then lastly - and the one thing I can officially announce - there came the contract signing on my long-gestating short story collection The War of the Rats and Other Tales, which will be coming out from my absolutely favourite Horror small press, Spectral, in August of this year.

With three major projects and a ton of short fiction scheduled for the next twelve months, I'm starting 2015 in a stronger position than I ever anticipated.  And as if that wasn't enough, the belated discovery that Working Tax Credit is a thing has put my financial situation on a less tenuous footing than I expected it would be at this point.  With To End All Wars almost ready to go out and both Degenerates and The Bad Neighbour hopefully to be finished before the end of the year, the question now becomes, can I sell novels too?  And, perhaps the even bigger question, can I do it for enough money to live off?

Well, who the hell knows, right?  But at least I'm looking forward to trying, and twelve months ago I never thought I'd be saying that.

I've Earned A Break

So, where are we?  Late October?  Only I'm writing this a few days earlier, because I'm about to go on holiday (off hiking in the Lake District, to be precise), and since I have no intention of doing anything that might be considered as work next week, and also since I want to go away feeling happy and maybe a little good about myself, here's a post about where all of my ongoing novel projects are currently at.

By way of context, I should mention how I have a bad habit of setting myself crazy targets and then sticking to them, even when there's a chance that doing so might kill me and possibly others in my vicinity.  This is something I'm working on; in the shorter term, I did worry that trying to finish drafts of three novels plus all the other things I had planned for my first year of writing full time might be a bit on the insane side.  As such, if there's one fact I'm glad for right now it's that not only am I on target, it hasn't proven apoplexy-inducingly difficult to stay there.  Nor, for that matter, has it been anything like easy.  Which I seem to remember from some government-mandated training course I did once is pretty much the ideal for targets.

Now I'm cheating a little, because once I get back (which, I guess, is when I'm posting this), there'll still be another week for things to go hideously wrong in; but assuming that doesn't happen, here's where all of my current projects should be by the end of this month:

• To End All Wars, the World War One-set Science-fiction novel I began at the start of the year, will be half way through its second draft.  And it feels like it's coming together nicely.  Given that my biggest issue with the first draft was its wordiness, it's satisfying to be going at the thing with a bone saw.  That first draft was a little over 103'000 words; I'm confident it will end up somewhere around ten thousand words shorter than that.  Whatever happens, I'm liking it a lot, and I'm still comfortable with saying it's the best novel I'm written so far.  Although that may change at any time, because...

• Degenerates, the book that began as a rewrite of 2010's difficult second novel War For Funland and has since turned into a whole new, vastly more interesting thing with the skeleton of War For Funland wriggling beneath its muscles, will be finished in first draft.  I'm way too engaged with it right now to be sure what I think of it, except to say that there was never a point where I felt that War For Funland was entirely a success and there's never been a point where I've felt Degenerates was a failure.  I find myself falling back on that word, interesting; and I keep realizing that at this stage I'm absolutely okay with it being that.  I know that in the next draft I'm going to have to hammer this crazy monstrosity into some sort of shape, but right now, interesting is an adjective I'm comfortable with.

• Then lastly there's The Bad Neighbour, my first stab at writing a crime novel, which will be past its mid-point and well on the way to an end-of-year finish.  Okay, this is the one thing about which I was maybe lying slightly above: as much as I'm on target (and indeed a fair bit ahead), it's looking like the target itself may be off; something that's been causing me a degree of panic since a) I'm pretty clearly obsessed with targets and b) this should not be a long novel.  It's supposed to be a book that jumps out and kicks you in the throat and then runs the hell away, and if it breaks 100'000 words I'm not sure it's going to be that book.  Still, that aside, I'm plenty happy with it.  It's not a bit like anything I've written, and since a large part of why I chose to write it was to see how far I could get out of my comfort zone before I burst into flames, that makes me feel like at least I'm achieving what I set out to.

All of which means there's a solid chance that I will in fact finish three first drafts this year, just like I planned - and perhaps more importantly, that I'll be happy with all three once they're done.  Giving up my livelihood to write full time has been one hell of an experiment, and one that still scares me a little every day.  Until I've got some books ready to sell I've no sure way to judge whether it has a chance of being a long-term success, and in the meantime my only measure is whether I can do the amount and quality of work I feel I should be doing to make a living as a writer.  So it's great to be able to say that right now, by those terms, I'm winning.

Six Months In

I've actually been working permanently as a writer for about seven and a half months now ... but I tend to discount that first month and a half before Christmas since I mostly spent it allowing myself some slack and addressed some lingering health problems, so by my reckoning it's basically been six months since I began writing full time.

Sadly this is not a cake I made myself to celebrate.

It's been, on the whole, a good six months.  But for a tough relationship break-up and a vicious bought of flu and the fact that you don't go from being physically and emotionally wrecked to joyously happy and Zenishly calm overnight, it might even have been a great six months.  But you know what, good is okay.  Good is, in fact, pretty good.  And I'm glad to say that the personal stuff is much improved: I've finally finished the interminable-seeming work on my sort-of-recently-purchased house; I've been learning and relearning all those life skills that working two jobs pushed to the sidelines; I've been repairing my health, rediscovering neglected friends, even starting to think about actual hobbies.  And most importantly, I've been writing five days a week, writing and editing and researching and blogging and submitting and keeping on top of e-mail, doing all those jobs that fall under the banner of Writer and being able to enjoy it all again.  Like any job it's had its off days, but the good ones have been by far the majority, and given what I gave up and gambled to do this it would have been pretty devastating if that weren't the case.

The upshot of all that is that I've written one and a half new books.  Almost exactly, in fact: To End All Wars is finished in first draft and The Novel Formerly Known as "War For Funland" is well past the fifty thousand word mark.  Add to that a comic and half a dozen short stories and I've produced nigh on 200'000 words, which is somewhere around three times my output of last year or just under twice that of the year before.  At the six month mark.  And most of it, I think, is as good as or better than anything I've done up until now.  I've also redrafted my first novella Patchwerk, thirty thousand words worth, and worked through about the same in short fiction.  And research-wise I've plowed through some twenty books, something I could never have even conceived of when writing was a second job.  I've done everything I'd hoped to get done and maybe a touch more, and while I'm definitely keeping busy it's rarely felt like a slog.

So that's it for the first six months.  Between now and Christmas I'd like to finish The Novel Formerly Known as "War For Funland" - god I'm so bored of calling it that, it's called Degenerates now, okay there I've said it!  I'd also like to get most of the way through an initial draft of my first Crime novel, currently under the working title of The Bad Neighbour.  At the same time I need a chapter plan of novel number seven ready by the end of December, which means figuring out an actual plot, which means a hell of a lot of research into both witchcraft and the Middle Ages.  Then there's the second draft of To End All Wars, a few more short stories, and ... well, whatever else comes up.  Even us obsessive planners can only obsessively plan so much.

The conclusion, if it isn't obvious by now, is that I'm not regretting my hazardous leap out of full time employment and into full time writing.  Right now I feel that even if it fails I still won't regret it.  I've wanted to do this since I was a kid, I understand now how badly I needed to do it, and now I am, and as I think I mentioned somewhere up there, it's good.

On Tearing it Up and Starting Anew

One of the pieces of advice that came to me in my formative writing years* - I think it was in Lisa Tuttle's Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, though I may be wrong - was that as a matter of course you should shelve your finished work and then, after a suitable period of absence, begin it afresh.  Give it some thought and it's not hard to see the advantages of such an approach: with so much groundwork already done, your brain is freed up to learn from all the dumb mistakes you made the first time through and spew pure awesome.  But it's harder not to also see the obvious disadvantage, which is that getting anything finished would take a goddamn age and you'd constantly be throwing your babies out with your bathwater - which all else aside, is bound to lead to a severely clogged drain.

Anyway, as advice it stuck with me, at first because it went against everything I believed about the writing process and then later, once I'd actually given it a go and produced good work on the back of it, because I could see the soundness of it but still knew full well I'd never make it my standard working practice.  Because life is too short, writing careers can be shorter still, and the more I write, the more I find that I like to write fast.

I certainly never imagined I'd do it with a novel.  So the fact that that's more or less what I'm now in the middle of seems worth commenting on.

What I'm trying with what was once called War For Funland and is now known as The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland is something I've never done before and desperately hope I'll never have to do it again, but I am doing it right now and by gosh it's liberating.  What's good gets polished.  What isn't - or what doesn't work, or fit, or just looks at me funny - gets chucked out, without a shred of mercy or regret.  My schedule gives me practically enough time to rewrite the whole thing from scratch so, hey, who cares?  What I keep is a bonus.  And what I write new will be better, because I've been this way before and know where are the pitfalls and rattlesnakes are hiding.

I've finished the prologue and the first of five parts now, which is solid progress given that this has so far been my B project after To End All Wars (which is really close to finished, by the way, and more on that soon.)  So far I'm finding that this sort of heavyweight rewriting is only a little quicker than writing anew, which I guess leaves the question of whether the results are actually better.  With two novels written together using wildly different approaches, it will be interesting to see which of the two first drafts I'm happier with, which needs more revision at the second draft stage, and whether the parts of The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland that survived in one form or another are significantly better or less in need of revision that the parts I wrote afresh.

In all honesty, though, I suspect those sorts of differences will be negligible.  The differences I'm noticing are ones of character, mostly, along with things like timing and plot construction that - in what is for me quite a layered and ambitious novel - I struggled to get right the first time through and now feel I have a far stronger grasp of on.  Good planning would have sorted much of that in the first place (and I have an infinitely more solid plan this time around) but it has to be said that this approach, what I may or may or not be misguidedly labeling The Tuttle Approach, is getting there too, and that's a definite argument in its favour.

So thanks, kind of, to Lisa Tuttle.  And, since I'm salvaging more than I'd originally hoped, thanks as well to me-of-four-years-ago for not making quite the hash of it that I felt like I was doing at the time.





* Which, thinking about it, I'd like to think I'm still in, since the last few months have been all sorts of formative.  I guess I mean my early formative years...

To End All Wars: Half Way!

I promised I wouldn't post every time I hit a landmark on new novel-in-progress To End All Wars, (at any rate I promised myself), but I didn't feel like I could let passing the half way point go without a brief mention.

Right now, I've written thirteen chapters of what, if all goes to plan, will be a novel of twenty three chapters, placing me comfortably on target to finish the first draft by the end of May.  The wider significance of all this is that, for the first time since my somewhat-disastrous experiment four years ago, I'm trying to write a novel full time, and to say there's a lot resting on it would be kind of an understatement.  One of my conditions to myself for being allowed to have a go at this full time writing lark was that I can produce at least - at least! - two novels a year, and that May deadline is an important landmark in proving I can pull that off.

What's perhaps even more important, though, is that not only am I on target with To End All Wars, I'm on target with everything else too.  In the last two and a half months, I've written two short stories and the first issue of a new comic book series, plowed through hundreds of pages of research, and mostly planned out the second novel I'll be starting this year, the book formerly known as War For Funland, which I hope to start come April ... meaning that for the first time in my life I'll be attempting to write two novels back to back.  Not to mention more short fiction and the various other smaller projects I'm working around those two monoliths.  Which, when you've been struggling to write a novel a year, sounds a bit crazy written down.  But hey, these are crazy times!

And once again I've attempted to talk about To End All Wars and rambled on about every other damn thing instead.  This shouldn't be taken as any indication of how excited I am by it or how well it's going - it's going very well and I'm exceedingly excited about it - but more a sign of how giddy I am to finally be able to throw myself at every damn project I feel like.  But yeah, TEAW is shaping up nicely, and in fact every bit as well as I could have hoped it would.  One of these days I'll have to write a post that does more than just mention it in passing...

War For Funland No More (But in a Good Way)

Back in the harsh winter-stroke-spring of 2010, I did a strange and possibly a stupid thing: I packed in a well paid IT contract to take a break for four months, live off my savings and write a new novel.  That novel was War For Funland, which you may remember from...

No, wait.  You haven't read it, or, unless you religiously follow this blog and have an astounding memory, even heard of it.  Because I never finished a second draft, let alone got it published.

So what went wrong?

Well, it didn't, exactly; except that it sort of did.  It's not untrue to say that the reason that second draft never happened was that not long after I finished I got a deal for my first novel Giant Thief, plus sequels, and suddenly there was no time in the world for poor, languishing War For Funland.  But it's just as true - and maybe a little truer - that the reason I never went back to it was that writing it in the first place had been such a demoralizing experience.  It was an experiment, and not one that had particularly worked; not so much the book itself, that is, but the whole endeavor.  I realised quickly that I might have inadvertently ended my IT career, and thus would quickly run out of money and find myself stacking shelves or gun-running or something, and also that I couldn't properly write a book in four months or whatever stupid amount of time I'd allotted myself.   It didn't help that I hadn't done enough planning, and was trying to knock out two thousand words a day with no time for digging myself out of plot holes, of which I soon discovered there were a multitude.

I battled on, but by the time I got to the end, for all that I'd finished a novel and in about a sixth of the time my first had taken, there was a sense of failure hanging over the project.  Enough that the thought of going back to wrangle War For Funland into some kind of meaningful, potentially publishable shape didn't exactly fill me with glee.

But it turned out that the one thing worse that trying to re-edit your not-quite-successful second novel is giving up on it and all those agonizing months of work.  And I'd always figured that if I didn't return to it before, I'd do it now, after I'd gone full time as a writer, when I had no possible excuse not to.  Even then, though, I wasn't enthusiastic.  War For Funland was my big failure, after all, the book full of plot holes and copious flaws, written at a hopelessly breakneck pace ... even reading through it to work out what I could salvage wasn't a fun prospect.

Well, it turned that it wasn't that bad.  I mean, it really wasn't.  It was, in fact, in places, pretty good.  There were chunks, some of them surprisingly large, that I was very happy with.  There were times when I found myself getting so caught up that I forgot I'd written it in the first place.  And what cheered me the most was that I could see my writing getting better, chapter by chapter; I'd spent so long thinking of the whole endeavor as a mistake that I'd never realised just how much I'd improved for doing it.

At any rate, I've come to the conclusion that War For Funland is absolutely salvageable, and I've no doubt now that there are the makings of a good book in there.  Except that a second draft isn't going to get me to that point.  What I'm looking at now is more a from scratch rewrite - which I'll be starting come next month.  My thinking at the minute is that I'll be scrapping two thirds to three quarters of the existing stuff.  Drastic, sure, but necessary if it's ever going to be the book I hope it can be.

Oh, and it's not called War For Funland anymore.  But I'm perhaps a bit too free and easy in announcing my titles, so let's just say it is for the moment.

(It isn't.)