I am amazed and pleased to announce that a draft of my novel-in-progress Until Guilty has been longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize. Congrats to everyone who made the longlist. It’s very inspiring company to keep!
This is the second longlisting for Until Guilty, along with the Exeter Prize. 2018 is shaping up to be a good year!
They are not actually as much help as they think they are…
And in other news, my story “Lost Memories of Air” won the Silver Pen Association’s annual award! Maybe they are inspiration after all?
After a long silence, some news….
First, my story “Lost Memories of Air” is out in Liquid Imagination. I love the teaser line (which is also the first line of the story): “I like Grandma better dead. Even when she does things like this.”
How can you NOT want to read it now?
Also, since I’m here, I’ll add a very late promo announcement for the third annual Clarion
Get your Yellow Volume now! (art by the amazing E.G. Cosh)
2012 Awkward Robots fundraiser anthology. Titled the Yellow Volume, its available on pay-what-you-want, with all proceeds going to the Clarion Foundation to support the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.
My story is called “Half the World is Night” and its about making ice and killing monsters in the desert…
A/N: I wrote this back in April, but was so busy with beta reader crits and getting the 4th draft done that I forgot I wrote this until now. Oops.
=>Finished the third draft today. Holy, holy f**k. It feels amazing to have reached this point. At so many times, over so many years, I truly doubted I could make it (okay, today I might have cried as I hit save. The YA-writer angst is in my blood, I suppose). But every time I went in a bookstore, I kept chiding myself: did I really think all those people could do something I couldn’t?
It feels really strange to be done. The thought of starting something new is…daunting. But intoxicating. That rush of inspiration. But now I know how long and twisting the road is…
Fine, fine. I’ve already started something else. Don’t judge.
And that makes it seem strange to look back on Nothing and Forever (though I’m thinking of changing the title to The Flip Side) in hindsight. I call it my 2014 NaNoWriMo project, though pure coincidence that I started it then and I never actually NaNoed. I finished the first draft in early 2015 then let it rest until Easter, when I broke my foot and had to skip EasterCon. My consolation prize: a long weekend to begin to make sense of my messy, messy first draft—and realising I had no idea how to apply my Clarion short story editing skills to novels. With short stories, it’s easy to keep the whole thing in my head even as I chop and change. I can keep a mental flipchart of what I had, what I want, what I cut, what disarray I’ve currently created. But novels are so freakin’ big…
So major heartfelt thanks (again) to all my Clarion instructors for sharing their wisdom, to all my writing friends who read snippets, listened to me blather on about my imaginary friends and how evil to them I planned to be. But in the end, just like writing the damn beast in the first place, editing is a forged-by-fire type deal. You gotta get down there knowing you *will* get burned.
So I backed off the second draft for a bit, thinking what story I really wanted to tell, what the arcs should be, etc, etc. Poking at it now and then. Then came summer 2015. My daughter spent 6 weeks with my parents, and I spent 6 weeks of 12–18 hour days with my novel. The closest I could get, I suppose, to applying my short-story/total-immersion method. The story came alive as I broke down scenes and acts, reconstituted them around the right emotional cores. I got the second draft done in those 6 weeks—but sprained my brain so much I couldn’t really look at it again until November. Which, at least, gave my first amazing beta time to tackle the beast.
During which time, of course, I had a major crisis of confidence about the new arcs etc. I went back to outlining, came up with a new structure, tore into the book, intent on imposing that vision. Got about halfway, found myself trudging through growing unease that although I was making things *different*, they weren’t necessarily *better*, and ultimately realised that nope, my original structure and arc were right. So then I had to revert-but-keep-those-few-nifty-plot-twists, plus finish edits to my original vision, which was now Draft 3. That took until April (A/N: When I originally wrote this). I remember I sold my house, finished the book, and was re-elected Chairperson of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio all in the same week—on top of full-time freelancing and being a single parent.
I gave it one more read through and a tinker, and shipped it out to betas. Went through it again and gave myself 8 pages of continuity notes. Nearly fainted at the Draft 3 wordcount: 123,786. Yikes. I knew it was still a kitchen-sink draft, but wanted beta-reader input as to where pacing really flagged to get a better idea of where I needed to cut.
So that’s how 3 drafts took 18 months. Way too slow, but I know I can get through edits faster now that I know the process. In fact, Draft 4 took only about a month or so, and yeah, I know I wasn’t making major changes, but then again, I got it down to around 109,000 so definitely some major surgery going on.
I can also already see in the new book how having gone through the editing process is letting me make better choices in the first draft. I understand the implications—the promises and payoffs—of my choices so much better now so—hopefully!!—I’ll get away with less time during edits spent wandering in circles, trying to figure out which segment should be my character arc.
And so it’s done, draft 4 done too as of last week. I swear, finishing a book turns me into Ned Flanders, because once again, I keep wanting to say, “it’s done diddly-un, done-diddly-un” over and over. Post-book-brain. Hell of a thing.
Perfect frame of mind for figuring out my query, right?
UPDATE: my 4th-draft beta sent me this as a teaser to let me know she’d finished reading. Trust a fellow writer to know how to hang a cliff…
Offering a printed-out (nearly final) draft of your novel to a beta reader is like handing over a still-bleeding hunk of your soul.
So I’ve done that thing, that British thing where you set off into something less than a drizzle or even mist, more of sodden air that doesn’t realise that there’s gravity for a reason, sure, go ahead, defy it, don’t fall to the ground but condense on my glasses so I can’t see, but it’s not actually raining, you see, so you keep your umbrella in your bag, nah, no need for it.
Then it starts to drizzle, but it’s not that bad, only the odd spot or two of rain, so you duck your head and keep going. Pull up your hood time, that’s all.
Okay, now it’s getting worse, we’re talking actual drops now, and you debate digging out the brolly, but you’re already damp and about half-way to wherever you’re walking, so do you really want to have to deal with a wet brolly for the rest of the day? Something that gets everything else in your bag soggy when you stow it away, and in any case, you inevitably forget to take out to dry when you get home so it moulders slowly for weeks as an added bonus. To say nothing of the fact that it’s gone a bit gusty so it would probably be blown inside out or right from your hands, and you’d end up chasing it down the road, like you do after a toddler who doesn’t know how to look both ways. Hell no, who wants to deal with that?
So you tug your hood down lower and soldier on, and then the next thing you know, you’re soaking wet, trudging through a driving rain, literally soaked, clothes like you wore them right from the washer, hair plastered against your head, socks drenched from puddles over the top of your shoes, with your umbrella still dry and safe in your bag because you’re wet through already and almost there so it *really* doesn’t make sense to dig it out now.
And then when you get wherever you were going, and people take in your bedraggled appearance, and someone inevitably remarks, “forgot your brolly?” and you shake your head and say, “didn’t feel like getting it wet,” this earns not looks of scorn but nods of total agreement.
So the year of the edit draws to a close. I feel like I’ve been three rounds with this story and been KO’d each time.
But…
But.
This is how you learn your opponent, no? Their head tilt before a low kick. The way they favour their left leg. The feint before a jab. The weaknesses. The tells that reveal who they are, who they really want to be.
I see you, story, so much better than I ever would have thought at the end of that stream of consciousness draft that poured out of me too fast to breathe. I see your feints, your fumbles, fancy footwork meant to dazzle but really distracting attention away from that unprotected flank.
And I also see those moments when the words peel themselves back up off the page and make magic, all on their own.
So, yeah. Editing.
It’s been… strange. I put the book away for a few months after finishing the second draft in August, filled with this grand idea that I’d pound out a quick first draft of something else. First drafts are not usually a problem for me, remember? The opposite, in fact. But this time…
Ahem. Who are these strangers and what the hell do they want? Normally, I love figuring all this out but now, for the first time I was aware—stub your toe in the dark type of shocking, total, instant knowledge that your inner map does not overlay the real world accurately—of how much longer and wider the road is.
How dirty my opponent is prepared to fight.
Because for the first time, I couldn’t do it. For the first time, I sat down to write and couldn’t simply dip the battered tin cup into the well of the subconscious, haul up wriggling words that couldn’t wait to fling themselves on the page.
Not writer’s block, though. No. Plenty of ideas, no problem there. More like this book, this goddamn book that I still love so much, this slippery just-one-more-draft-where-I-show-you-the-tricks-up-my-sleeve book. It’s gone and got itself more. More depth. More layers. More nuanced, conflicted characters. More painful choices for them to make. So much bigger than it was at the end of the first draft that my brain doesn’t have room for a new story at the moment.
And how strange it felt to sit down to do something, to want to do something, and realise that your brain won’t cooperate. Yeah, I could have forced it, but not the best choice. That would have been more like scurrying back to shore after finally battling out past the breakers.
Plus, I trust my subconscious when I write my books, so I supposed I should trust it when it tells me it still needs the brain-space for this holy-hell-ain’t-you-done-yet book. That working on something else would mean letting go of some of the pressure building, gelling, fermenting for this final draft.
The book is stronger, but somehow, to my utter surprise, so am I.
Round 4, here I come.
See you on the flip side.
