Unlucky for Some

I had a random e-mail this afternoon from Kindle Direct Publishing, which is the site I used to post my writing on Amazon. Alas there has been no mad rush to purchase my stuff, but it did encourage me to log onto my KDP account, and I had a browse back through my sales over the years.

It’s the grand total of 7 for Momentum and State Line. I totted it up, and accounting for exchange rates from Aussie dollars, the vast sum I’ve earnt from my writing is £12.89. Now you may think I’m about to indulge in some poor me, isn’t that a pitiful amount, what a waste of time etc, etc (if you are a long-term reader of this blog you’d be forgiven for thinking so!) but actually it’s the opposite. You can dress it up how you want, but the facts are that I’m a published author. People (and not just mates) have paid their hard-earned to read my work. And I have to say I’m proud of that fact. It feels like writing something new and good is far away at that moment, but no-one can ever take that away from me. And for as long as Amazon exists as a platform, a tangible sign of my existence, however insignificant, will be there, and a little window into my style and personality will live on.

So, yeah. Unlucky for some? Not in my book.

It’s Over

After 20 long months, sometimes unhappy, always a grind, the first draft of my 6th novel is complete. I remember the feelings of exaltation and relief when Gaslight, the novel I’m probably most proud of, was completed (a longer draft and in less time than the current effort) and knew that I had something. The emotion this time is the complete antithesis of that.

I’ve broken all the golden rules, really. The first is finishing to a deadline, by hook or by crook. I’ve written countless posts over the last year in which I thought the end was in sight, and every failure made me more depressed with the whole thing. It’s been more than a monkey on my back, more like a fucking gorilla. So, in the last week, I’ve kind of washed my hands of the manuscript and wrapped everything up. I’m moving house next week, and so the coming months will be busy, and I didn’t want to have it hanging over my head.

‘Wrapping it up’ is a laughable description of the novel’s conclusion. It’s an utter disaster area. There are subplots that don’t go anywhere. Character actions that are inexplicable. I started the novel at its conclusion, and then worked back from there, and the two sides don’t match. It’s like two different books written by two different people. Worst of all, I’ve tried to inject a twist or two and I’ve fallen flat on my face. I wanted to have the unreliable narrator, at once compelling and shocking, so the reader is never on firm ground. Is he a murderer or a misunderstood innocent? But it just comes across as confusing. I’ve gotten myself into a tangle on basic but essential plot elements, too. I have no idea how I’m going to resolve it.

The greatest fear of all, as it always is, is whether this is it. Maybe I’m washed up. Five passable novels is more, in output at least, than some have managed (Harper Lee, J.D Salinger to name two off the top of my head). So it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that I’m not cut out for it anymore. And I feel a scintilla of guilt that I’ve wasted nearly two years of writing on a novel that will never be read by anyone except me, and for what? Ordinarily my personal happiness and enjoyment is enough, but I’ve not felt that this time. It’s been a terrible slog. Tedious on occasion. I’ve felt utterly helpless, and unable to cut a trail through the thicket.

So, for now, I don’t want to write a word of fiction for a good while. As I said, moving house will take up most of my time, and making the flat presentable, and hopefully a change of scenery (I can just about see the sea from the lounge window) will ignite a spark again. If I really am done, I genuinely don’t know what I’m going to do to stay sane. Writing is all I have that’s mine, really. Without it, what do I have left?

Over and Over

It doesn’t feel like there’s much more to say about this damn novel that I haven’t already said. Other than book reviews and the odd personal post this has been my sole creative work of the whole year. I can’t even call it a passion, as it feels more like a chore than anything else. I’ve had years before where I’ve only been working on one novel, but the feelings this time around are totally different. Then I couldn’t wait to see how it ended; this time I know but I still can’t get to the finish line. Little things keep popping up and getting in the way. The main reason for this is my lack of discipline really. I’ve let the characters go down their tangents, thinking it will go somewhere, and all it does is increase the word count with not much to show for it. I’m certain that I’m going to have to ditch vast swathes of it, which in essence means that I will have long writing sessions that have been completely wasted.

I’m sure I’ve said before that no time spent writing fiction is ever wasted, you learn something with every completed work, but it doesn’t feel like that at the moment. Much like this post, the novel doesn’t appear to be doing much more than revisiting old themes and territory, although there is a complexity to the main romantic relationship that feels more realistic. In fact those bits I’m quite proud of, I enjoy the back and forth, and they do keep me on my toes. But everything else is stale. It’s hard to admit when you’ve invested so much time and energy, but there it is. I’m too close to the end to sack it off now.

I suspect the last knockings won’t be as good as they could be either, because I’m desperate to get it finished. The temptation to cut a corner here and there and worry about it later, well that’s the overriding feeling every day. Which isn’t a great position to be in. It would be nice to enjoy the Christmas holidays by having an actual break, not slipping off on Christmas Eve to bang my fictional head against the wall for an hour.

Anyway this isn’t the cheeriest post for the Christmas season, so apologies for that. I am dreaming of a time where I can write something shorter, although whenever this does get finished I will be taking a longer break than usual as I’m moving house at some point in the New Year. So potentially the next novel that I write will be born on different premises. Maybe that will be the catalyst, all six novels will have been written in the same house. Perhaps a fresh perspective, even just a different view to be looking at for inspiration, might be enough. I’ll cling to that. Merry Christmas.

Surprise Surprise

So in the least surprising news of the season, I didn’t make it. I’m in the end game of the novel now, but the word count gets higher and the conclusion drifts further into the distance. I suspect I’ll write nothing when in Australia, even though there may be opportunity, and ordinarily I’d feel bad about that, that I would lose impetus. But the pieces are all in their correct place on the board. All I have to do is play it out.

So my aim now is for a final push on my return and the novel finished by Christmas. Which would be a scarcely believable 18 months from start to finish. Glacial.

So expect a post in January on a similar theme to this one!

Frantic

So I’ve got a trip back to Australia booked for mid-October, and the time has come around with frightening speed. I actually booked the flights pre-Covid, so rearranging the flights felt like a free trip, as they had already been paid off. I had a quick look back over the early posts of this blog, when I lived in Melbourne, and how excited and happy I was, and it kind of made me feel sad. How precious those times were, and how certain I was that I had found my place, that I was exactly where I wanted to be with the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. All seems a long time ago now, and shows the fragility of dreams.

I’m actually approaching the trip with excitement, although I know its going to be emotional in parts. even heartbreaking, and a reminder of all I have lost, but what I wanted to talk about in this post is how its given me a deadline to get the first draft of this damn novel completed. I leave in 42 days. That’s 21,000 words at 500 a day. I never write seven days a week though, so you can scratch a couple of thousand off that. So 20,000 or thereabouts. But my feeling is, despite being almost at 120,000 words now, is that there is going to be more to say than that. Time wise I’m into the last weeks of the novel, but that mean’s nothing with my tendency to overwrite.

So the challenges to get the draft finished in that timeframe is going to be a huge one, and will no doubt result in some frantic writing sessions as I go hell for leather for the finish line. I’m worried about quality, as if I go too fast it diminishes. I’m sure there are huge plot holes that will only widen with extra speed. But I can’t leave without having it done. I don’t want to have a three week break to have it gnawing away at me whilst I’m on holiday. I want to try and relax as much as possible in Australia, as it will be hard enough as it is to cope emotionally, and I want a clear mind to try and make the attempt. So God knows how the first draft will turn out. I suspect there will be noticeable changes in pace. But I don’t care too much for that right now. I have to get it finished, and the rest I can worry about when I’m back.

Squaring the Circle

Just looked back on my post in January, and ever the optimist, I commented on being 50,000 words into the novel, thought I was halfway, and hoped to finish by summer. Well somehow August has crept up on us and those ambitions have crashed and burned. I’ve been lucky, I think, in that despite my lack of planning with my novels, I’ve never gotten myself so helplessly entangled that I couldn’t see how to resolve it. The characters have always managed to work it out for themselves, and that makes my job far more easier. But this time, I’ve found myself with two conflicting strands of the narrative, and no solution on how to resolve it.

Part of the issue is that, to touch on character again, is that the main protagonist is alive and well in my head, but the supporting players are flitting in and out, and I can’t get a handle on them. In previous novels the lesser characters have sometimes appeared fully-formed, as if I’ve known them all my life, and tell their story seamlessly. At the moment this isn’t the case. It’s like I’m watching them with myopic eyes. It’s only occasionally that they come close enough to swim into focus.

The way forward? That’s a good question. Part of me is tempted to go for it hell for leather and ignore the gaping hole in the narrative. That’s what rewrites are for, after all. But I think if I do that when I come to mould the novel a second time I could read it back and find I can’t make head nor tail of it. And I always find that once the first draft is complete, the characters voices start to fade almost straightaway. They’ve done their bit, as it were. If I have to do a complete overhaul any dialogue or characterisation I will need to add is going to sound stilted, disjointed. I know this is always the case when re-writing, but on the whole I’ve only ever had to remove all the extraneous stuff and tidy up the plotting, not make enormous structural changes. As it stands the opening 2,000 or so words will need extensive editing, which I will hate, as I’m always the weakest at the beginning of books anyway. Plus there is much more flashback in this novel than any other, and trying to keep a handle on timelines is going to be a struggle. The whole prospect, as you may have gathered, will be daunting, and is one I fear.

So I’ve got to square the circle somehow, otherwise the probable 18 months of writing will have all been for nothing. I need to push the doubts to the back of my mind and run like the wind.

Stubborn

For some reason it has always been beyond me to say that a novel I’m writing just isn’t working and to abandon it. The obvious riposte to this is all the time I’ve spent working on the damn thing (it’s the one year anniversary tomorrow and I’m still not at 100,000 words) and to give it up now would see hours of work frittered away.

But the counter argument does appear more compelling. You could argue that I’m wasting my time regardless, for two main reasons: First, that it’s a load of crap anyway, so the time spent is not worthwhile, and if that somehow isn’t true, no-one will care about the finished result or want to read it. I see that. I know what will happen when the first draft is done. I’ll breath a sigh of relief, feel that weight lifted from my shoulders, drink too much and watch crap TV for a couple of weeks, then either go back and do a re-write of something or launch headlong into something new with a cavalier regard for my mental health, and more importantly, whether the idea I have is any good at all, or will turn into a pale imitation of a novel I’ve written before (which I’m sure this one is. I can’t shake the feeling).

So if I bother to finish it I’ll end up back in the same place as always. But I know I’ll persevere. Partly because of an optimistic hope that I can pull something from the wreckage of the first draft and wield it into a workable manuscript, but mostly because I’m to stubborn and stupid to sack the whole thing off. This state of mind is clearly not helping the smooth flow of words to erupt from my subconscious, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment, and I’m clinging to it with all my might.

My Corona

I guess it was almost inevitable considering the spread of the Omicron variant, but earlier this month I finally succumbed to Covid. I must say it is slightly surreal when that red line finally shows up on a lateral flow test, a hint of panic but some relief as well, that it’s here and I’ve got to get it over with. I knew it was coming as a lot of work colleagues and people I know from sporting events were falling foul of it, and I was mildly symptomatic (nothing more than a sore throat and runny nose though). It wasn’t enough to keep me from working (at home, obviously) but I did have to go the full 10 days before consecutive negative tests. Self-isolating for that period is not fun. My house only has a small garden, so walking up and down there for exercise is nothing short of tedium, especially when I started to feel better. I had a couple of social events that I had to cancel as well, which was frustrating. But all in all it could have been a lot worse. I was glad I got my booster jab before Christmas, as I’m sure that limited the symptoms. It does feel good knowing I’ve had it and now have gained extra immunity. It does, touch wood, feel like we’re in the endgame of the pandemic now anyway, with restrictions all but lifted, so catching it in the tail end from the minor variant should hopefully mean that’s my only brush with Covid.

So how did all that affect my writing, I hear you ask? Well not much, really. During those self-isolation days my routine was pretty much identical day-to-day, and I factored in a window to write on each of those days. And I’ve pretty much carried on in that vein since, so my work ethic has improved as a result. I’m up around 50,000 words now, and my feeling is the novel is about halfway, so I’m well into it. I’m certain that I’m going over similar themes that I explored in Gaslight, and probably in a more mediocre way, but I’m content with the daily sessions, which I wasn’t a few months ago, when everything was a grind.

How I’ll feel about it in a weeks time, let alone 6 months, is a mystery. I’m sure I’ll finish it now, probably in the summer, but other than a sense of accomplishment, I suspect I won’t have any great feelings of joy about it. It’ll join my ever-growing collection of novels and that will be it.

Set Piece

OK, the good news is that I’m feeling a bit better about the ongoing struggles with the novel I’m writing. As usual, inspiration has come when I least expected it and somehow out of nowhere. Often I find it happens when idly browsing random stuff on the internet, ordinarily I chastise myself for wasting time doing so, but sometimes it can throw up something that gives me a kernel of an idea. In this instance I needed something to kickstart the narrative and start to really highlight the conflicts between the characters. What better way to do so than a set piece?

What I was thinking of was a social event of some kind where things go horribly wrong. A sort of car crash of embarrassment and the spilling over of pent-up emotion that both pushes the story along and gives some opportunity for ripe dialogue and emotional conflict. There are many great examples in literature, but I’m thinking along of the lines of Christos Tsiolkas, who does this to incendiary effect in Barracuda, and to a lesser extent in The Slap. The kind of scene where you know something awful is going to be said or done, in front of a large group of people. The narrative has been building to the tension to this point, and the reader knows with an ever increasing feeling of discomfort that it’s all going to blow. Herman Koch is another who employs this technique with masterful precision (in fact his novel The Dinner is one big set-piece really, and the ending has formed many a book-club discussion ).

Without giving too much away, and I’m obviously not in the calibre of the two authors mentioned, but a dinner party and post-food game has formed a central part of my novel, and I’d say probably the last 10,000 words has been taken up on it. After the difficulties I’ve had bringing myself to write the last few months, this has flowed a lot better. I’m much more at home with dialogue and the party game scene has had some nice back-and-forth, and I think it has cranked up the tension quite well. I can’t think of a more enjoyable few days of writing that I’ve had in ages.

And it all came from a moment of luck when I spied a version of the game online, and it sparked the thought that it would be an excellent way to reveal some character motivation and conflict. So it has proved. It is nice when a hunch comes off for once.

Up and Down

I’ve found the biggest challenge to getting any writing done since my last post has been a mental one. I’m doing all the right things: devoting a period of time each evening to write (excluding weekends at the moment), getting my daily word count done by hook or by crook, and being as intuitive as I can by writing in my notebook when a plot point sorts itself out or a character description becomes apparent. So in terms of a narrative, it’s coming along, inching towards 20,000 words. Still a long way to go though, so if completed it will definitely be of novel length.

But the mental task of getting through the words is harder than it’s ever been. I’m struggling to get into that headspace where the words flow from nowhere. I think there are a number of reasons for this. First, I have a lot more in my life to think about. Being in a relationship is great, but it comes with extra emotional heft, as I’m not able to be selfish anymore. Don’t get me wrong, things are going well, but without getting too corny, we’re a team now, so her worries and issues are mine too. I feel like my mind is flitting all over the place thinking of various things, and it won’t settle down when it comes to writing time.

The same could be said of family of course, and there are a couple of health-related issues there which have been playing on my mind a bit. And to top it off, I have distinctly noticed my own mental health has taken a bit of a hit recently. It’s the general stress of everyday life really, work is a huge cause of stress for me and it isn’t improving on that front. I’m not sleeping too well, and am plagued with surreal dreams or nightmares practically every night. And the days when I slept in until my alarm went off appear to be over. I’m awake most days before 7am, no matter what time I go to bed. Most irrational of all is that I’m starting to get lost in fears about my own mortality again. This happens on an occasional basis. I get into a sort of malaise about being halfway through my life and not having much to show for it, and that simple conviction can keep me down for weeks. It passes eventually, with no rhyme or reason, but I know it will come back soon enough. It’s actually quite debilitating.

So it’s a bit of a tough slog at the moment, but I’m surviving, and the words are still coming out, however painfully. I can’t ask for any more than that.