I finished drafting a book this week.
It's been a long time coming: eighteen months or so, longer than I’ve ever spent seriously working on a first draft before. I started writing with probably more excitement than I’d ever taken into a draft before. I made playlists! I thought about my characters with all the dizzy intensity of a new lover! Snatches of dialogue and description inserted themselves into my head at odd moments, as though waiting to be plucked out of the air! It felt effortless.
By June or so of this year, it had become a grind. On good writing days, I used to get down 2000 words easily, but now it was a struggle to eke out a quarter of that. I still believed in the story, but I’d been in it so long I didn’t feel able to see the forest for the trees anymore. Throw in a long series of rejections, a novel dead on sub, and chronic migraines that sometimes make me feel like I’ve been hit by a bus for the next two days, and getting anything writing-related done felt exhausting, like trying to sprint through treacle. Surely it was all terrible, anyway. Readers would see right through the words and the characters to me: a listless writer pushing paper dolls around on the page.
And then, a few weeks ago, it was as though something shook loose. I sat down to write and surfaced 1500 words later feeling like I could keep going. The next day, 1600. From there, reaching the end felt joyous and a little unbalancing, like sliding down a snowy hillside on a bin bag.
If this was a writing advice blog, this would be the part where I explained what it was that brought my mojo back and how you could employ it to hack your own writing life – but it isn’t, and the truth is I don’t really know. Maybe it was the advent of autumn, which suits the book’s mood far better than summer (it both starts and ends on Halloween). Maybe it was just some quirk of brain chemistry. Maybe it’s because I started taking Vitamin D again? Who knows??
So, why tell you about it?
I don’t know where the book will go from here. Maybe it’ll fall apart in edits and have to be completely rewritten, maybe it’ll die on submission, or maybe, just maybe, it will eventually make it out into the world, becoming something that you can hold in your hand or download onto your Kindle and read and have opinions on.
But if it does, I probably won’t talk about this bit. I’ll talk about themes and inspiration, or maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to talk about some craft stuff, about handling the rotating POVs and timelines or crafting voices for two main characters from very different backgrounds. I won’t talk about all the moments when I thought, I’ve written 300 words today and they’re all crap, or What’s the point?
As writers, we’re encouraged to think of our platforms as branding exercises. We need to be upbeat and professional, or friendly and relatable, and if we do talk about the negatives, it should be in the form of tidy, actionable nuggets of advice. I’m kind of over that – writer-as-brand, writer-as-influencer. I don’t have the temperament to be either of those things, anyway. But I think part of pushing back against the pressure to be cheery and productive at all times is just… being honest, like this. Sometimes it sucks and there’s no quick fix, just plugging away or taking a break, whichever suits you, and trusting that your enthusiasm will come back online eventually.
Maybe sometimes it keeps on sucking, and you decide to rip it up and start again. I don’t think there’s any shame in that, either.
I do already know that, when I come back to this book in the new year to start editing, I won’t be able to tell which of the words on the page are the ones that flowed easily and which felt like pulling teeth. Worrying that the readers will be able to sense my frustrations through the page is an exercise in narcissism, really – it’s just one I have to go through and get over every time.
I will be able to see the contours of the story that lit my brain up like Blackpool Illuminations two years ago waiting to be chiselled out from beneath the first-draft rock – and this part, I like.
Writing news
I don't have much beyond the above to share this month. November's
New Welsh Review
, featuring my essay on Gothic doubles, doesn't seem to have made it out onto shelves yet, but I'll keep you posted when it does -- it looks like being a great issue.
It's the season when people start making posts with lists of their awards-eligible work published this year. I haven't got around to that yet, but I did make a
with all the original stories I've published this year, so you can check them out there.
For anyone who's recently migrated to BlueSky from Twitter and is looking for cool people to follow, I also created a starter pack of people who read, write, or post about speculative fiction in Wales -- you can find the list
What I've been reading
Just finished Wole Talabi's
, a fun anti-colonial heist romp about a Nigerian nightmare god stealing back an artefact from the British Museum, albeit one occasionally let down by the treatment of female characters.
What I've been watching
Earlier in the month, I managed to catch the stage adaptation of
Pontypool
at the Wales Millennium Centre. Unlike the film, the stage play is set in Pontypool, Wales, AKA my hometown. I think if I'd watched this ten years ago, I might've found its 'watch what you say' messaging ham-fisted, but these days it feels urgent. Well-staged and viciously funny, too.
What I've been listening to
A new Indelicates album is an insta-buy for me, and their combination of brutal satire and pop pathos remains intact on their latest,
That's all from me for now. 'Til next time.
JL