Here we go then

Well, here we go then. I’ve spent the last <muffled noise> years writing, re-writing, editing, re-reading, editing, more editing. At times I lost sight of why I was doing it.

I had moments when I couldn’t face looking at the last sentence I’d written because I knew I’d have to write more when I wasn’t inspired to do so. I fell out of love with my characters. I’d leave it for a week and re-read a previous chapter and think “Bloody Hell, did I write this? I love it!” I fell back in love with my characters. Then I’d furiously write some more until the impetus wore off. All in all, writing a novel has been a roller coaster of an experience.

The process began with a simple story in my mind and I can still remember the dream that inspired part of the underlying mythos. I never set out to write a novel! As with countless other stories I have started over the years I found myself struggling to get it out of my brain and onto the page. I got to a certain point and thought: “Oh I’m stuck.

Don’t know what to do here. Nevermind, I’ll give up – it was only for fun anyway.” And that was OK. After all, I only ever wrote stories for my own amusement. Nobody else got to see them. But I’d written quite a lot this time. Not hundreds of words – thousands of them! Tens of thousands. It seemed like a waste of time if I gave up so I took a deep breath, let my better half have a read of the first few chapters and she implored me to carry on and make something of it.

So I did. I finished the story. I read it. It was alright. Actually, it was amazing in places but fell short in quite a few others. So I did the thing I had been dreading: I let others read my work! As an introvert, this step was huge. What if they hated it? What if I’ve wasted <muffled noise> years on this for everyone to say it’s rubbish and to stop dreaming? But that’s what all writers do and, as it turns out, I had nothing to worry about! The feedback I received from those who gave up their time to read my work was absolutely constructive. I ended up turning my characters into better people and my chapters into something more engaging. I had drive once more and edited each and every chapter several times.

By the time I finished I had a story just over 180,000 words long. I was a little concerned. Sure, fantasy epics eat 180k words for breakfast (just look at George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire word counts), but as an aspiring debut novelist it seemed a little too long. I re-read the entire manuscript and ultimately decided that I couldn’t get rid of anything else – those 180k words were all needed to tell my story the way I wanted.

Ignoring the usual word count warnings plastered across writers’ forums, I took a gamble and left it as it was. My next hurdle: find a publisher. I’d got it into my head that I wanted to be an independent author. Whilst the big publishing houses are great and have a lot of literary clout, I wanted to have more control over my work. I approached a number of publishers, several of whom are champions of new authors. I suffered a few rejections (and astronomical quotes for ‘self publishing’ fees!), which dampened my enthusiasm for the project, but finally received the email all budding authors want to see – we want to publish your book.

Cue the excitement and jumping around!

TL;DR – Anyway, the whole point of this rambling post is for me to say how exciting it is
to know that something I have imagined and created is imminent for publication. More
news/updates to follow.

Parting advice: Be excellent to each other…
Much love, Mike x