Let's Talk Books

If I had to sum up my writing journey so far, the first word that comes to mind, is ‘Drafting.’ I have been, to some extent or another, drafting this novel since 2020. I sat down, in the midst of a global pandemic, and put the swirling mass of ideas to paper. I unpicked it all, a painstaking task I would imagine isn’t unlike trying to catalogue the construction material of a bird’s nest – that is to say, it was time-consuming, tedious, and not overly helpful.

At the end of that process I had not one, not two, but four books. A series tracked from inception through to conclusion. I had love, death, war, hurt, joy, and loss all laid out before me in the inky scrawl of glitter gel-pen.¹ From that exercise book – filled as it was with notes to myself, pages after pages of character names, lists of Gods, musings, and rhetorical questions – I constructed a world.

I finished the first ever full draft of my novel on 29/04/2021. It took me just about a year. I can be pretty solid on my dates for 2 reasons:

1. I was a bartender when COVID struck and my last shift before that 1st Lockdown was St Patrick’s day.
2. I helpfully took a picture on the day I finished the first draft.

So there I was, one full draft in front of me, nearly 3 years ago. And here I am now, unpublished, blogging about it. 3 years is a long time, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to go from first draft to at least querying in that time. In my defence, I was busy. I finished a degree, then I earned a Masters degree, then I got a grad job, then I left that job for one at a big 5 publishing house. I went out, I stayed in, I won several pub quizzes, I saw friends, I travelled to Germany, I read (a lot), and I drafted. Redrafted, really. I started from scratch, several times. I added things in. I took them back out. I sat down with that same exercise book, those same smudged pages of notes and planning, and I asked it for help. Nothing worked, nothing was right. And then, quite suddenly, it was. I had always been a pantser at heart. That was what I needed, organised chaos. An opportunity to try things on like the heroine in a romcom; except rather than a colourful movie montage of riotously colourful outfits, I had a series of frustrating afternoons, and a promise to myself that I’d drink less coffee.

Thus, draft one became draft two. Draft two was different; it was about double the length, for one thing. Any half-decent writing advice website will tell you the ideal length for a novel is between 60k and 80k words. There’s some lee-way either side of that, but realistically nothing should be clocking in too much higher. Now, as a genre, fantasy has famously long books. For fantasy, specifically, there’s a little more grace. 100k maybe, 110k… Mine, as it stands, is at 160k plus change. For those who can’t be asked to google it that averages out (if you account for the various spacing options) at about 500 pages. This would be a good time to ask your friends to read it, but to my mind it is a cruel thing to ask someone to read 500 pages of work when you can’t even be sure it’s all grammatically correct. So draft two enters edits, the first full round I’ve done. I start at the top, stripping things out, adding things in, integrating world building, rehashing speech until it sounds likely. I add romances, I take out arguments, I add people, I kill them off, I send many a text to my friends that starts ‘Name a BLANK’ and then don’t use any of their suggestions. What I’m getting at here, is that I work. I work hard. I spend literal hours poring over the same chapters again and again. Draft 2, edit round 1? Done.

I’m about 2 years on by then, plus a couple months, which brings us to Summer 2023. This was the first time I had ever asked people to read it. That’s a lie. This is the first time anyone I had asked, actually did read it. I have amazing friends, I really do, but we’re all busy doing that ‘I’m trying to build a life’ thing everyone has to do in their 20s. After a few weeks one of my amazing friends got back to me. We’ve since sat down and gone through her thoughts in detail, but I think this quote from those first few messages really sums up how she felt about it:

I frigging loved it, and I hate you x

Relief. She loved it. She hates me, but aren’t all good fantasy authors a little be hated? And it’s long, it’t too long, it’s career limiting-ly long… but she read it, every word, every sentence, even when they didn’t make perfect sense. I’m onto the second round of edits now, what I’m hoping will be the last. Other friends have it, although they haven’t read it yet. I await their feedback, but part of knows now – even if her words were coloured by 10+ years of friendship – that there’s a reader for it. And I’ll write the series, even if only Laura ever reads it.

This will be my final draft. I know that. Now I am in pursuit of grammatical correctness. I am tidying up, tightening things, handing out commas, semi-colons and colons like the Oprah of punctuation. I have been a writer for a long time, perhaps 2024 will finally be the year where I become an author.

1. There’s a little tip for those of us who suffer with writer’s block and perfectionism, no one has ever had to show anyone else a document they hand wrote in raspberry pink glitter pen. 10/10 recommend for getting out of your own head. ↩︎