Wow. Okay. A writing update seems to be in order, right? With a note that if you’d like to be kept apprised of writing developments in a live(ish) fashion, Instagram is the place for that. Because my account is public, I think you don’t even need an account to view? Not sure, will have to double check that. Anyway, my stories* on Insta is where it’s at if you want regular writing-and-life updates-with-pictures on a near-daily basis 😀 Just in case you were wondering 😀
* You probably already know, but to see stories (as opposed to the main feed posts), click on my profile picture at the top if it has a coloured ring around it, the coloured ring indicating that there are stories available to be viewed at present. 😉
MOVING ON.
Okay, writing updates. Wow. (Again.) Well, first of all, Many Things Have Changed. First thing to note is that, since leaving teaching in July 2022, I have now written nearly another two novels. Considering I only have five novels out right now, that’s a significant increase! Why ‘nearly’, however? Well. The one I attempted in 2022 is about 2/3 done (and was originally supposed to be a novella, AH HA HA HA HA) but I took a left turn halfway through the book and ended up with Unexpected Dragons (literally, I kid you not, the character turned a corner and suddenly, BAM!, dragons) and I’m not 100% sure if I want to commit to this at this time in this book, because it will have All Sorts Of Flow-On Implications if I do 😀 So I decided to let that one go away and sit in a corner and Think About What It’s Done for a while, while I too think about it and decide if I want to keep the left turn, or if, in fact, I want to go back and make it a right turn.
And then last year’s novel, the 2023 one, called Touchstone (which has a pretty cover I have previously squeed here about), was all set to be complete by year’s end, and then I hit the climax of the novel, and… it wasn’t the climax? It was the Great Fail that occurs right before the climax? Which meant that instead of a couple of chapters remaining, the book has about 10k words to go (like, 5ish chapters). Now, this is actually quite fine, and honestly would only take me 3 or so weeks to write… except that having the thing I thought was the climax actually be the ante-climax means that this has Flow-On Implications for a) the pacing of the book (have I now spent too much time dithering? probably – there are a few too many ‘sit and talk’ chapters right now) and b) the theme of the book, because this is tightly linked to the character arc, and if there is another Big Character Moment before the climax, then THAT has Flow-On Implications for the main character’s arc and development, which in turn impacts the theme (which isn’t a scary thing, theme is literally just the Moral Of The Story which is very usually the Thing The Main Character Learns, hence the link), which means I may need to tweak my opening third to make sure it’s setting the theme up correctly, and, and, and, and, and.
As a result, I’ve been flatly ignoring Touchstone since November, only side-eyeing it occasionally to decide if a) it’s decided to finish itself yet or if not then b) if it has any clues for me yet as to HOW to finish it 😛
So far, not much has been forthcoming, though I did have a bit of a breakthrough this week. The thing is, when you’re working on a Really Long Project (which, it often takes a lot longer than a year to write a novel, so I’m not complaining, but OTOH my ADHD brain is like WE HAVE BEEN WORKING ON THIS SAME PROJECT FOR ELEVEN MONTHS PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF SANITY LET IT BE DONE), it’s really easy to experience Intention Drift: you start you thinking you’re doing Thing A, and by the time you finish you realise that not only have you done Thing B in the text (if you’re lucky, and it’s not Things B, C, D, E and F), you actually WANT to have done Thing C, so now you have to decide if it’s worth redoing the opening half to match your new intentions, or if you pull the second half back into line with the first half.
See, I really THOUGHT I was writing a book about what it feels like when your Amazing Skill actively hurts (kills) other people, and how you deal with the whole ‘being yourself’ thing when that has pretty serious, tangible consequences. HOWEVER, although there’s a bit of that shoehorned into the opening chapters, what it turns out that I’ve written is more of a ‘what it feels like when you have Powerful Abilities that other people want to blackmail you/bully you/control you into using for their own purposes.’
Which, both these things make sense: a year ago, I was very much in the headspace of unlearning a lifetime of habits that were designed to keep me small and safe, designed to minimise my own skills so as not to make others around me uncomfortable. Now, I’m less in that headspace, though I’m not sure where the control aspect has come from, but clearly it’s SOMEthing my subconscious is processing because I’ve watched a lot of Burn Notice the last few months (the key theme there is how to avoid having others control you when you have Skillz that can be put to Less Than Moral Purposes in the wrong hands/context) and All The Things We Saved You From, my novella that I haven’t announced here yet but which is coming out in June, deals more-or-less with this idea too.
So now I’m struck trying to decide: do I do what I feel like is going to be a harder edit, but something that will pull the book more in line with my ‘brand’, and stick to the original intent of exploring how you can be yourself without harming others, or do I do what I feel like is the easier edit to match where my head is at right now, even though it means maybe writing a little outside what has historically been my brand?
Like, this is not a Terrifying Decision, I have no fear of my brand changing and evolving, it’s just… interesting to me, I guess, that I have managed to write a main character whose deepest fear is Being Controlled, when that doesn’t actually really register for me personally. I mean, it’s not like I WANT to be controlled, but if we look at the Enneagram personality types, fear of being controlled is squarely an 8, and literally the 8 type is one of only, like, three of the types I don’t resonate with.
And yet, the FMC of the 2/3rds book I wrote in 2022 smells a lot like an 8 as well (though the MMC is definitely a 1 like me), so I’m just kind of here scratching my head being like, um, sorry, what? How did this happen??
So yeah. Not a Big Deal, just a mildly Confusing, How Did We Get Here sort of one, and something I want to decide careful re: editing Touchstone, because I really don’t want to make Decision A, edit the book, and then regret it and have to edit all over again. (Like, I know that is something that a) some people do deliberately and b) is totally survivable, but for me personally it’s a very big ADHD Says Nope and would likely mean I’d drop the book entirely for a couple of years until I could stand to redo it all again, sigh.)
Well. This wasn’t exactly the update I was planning on giving, but it’s definitely an accurate update, so here we are 😀 I hope you didn’t mind this little window into the mind of a working writer, and the challenges and decisions we often have to face 😀 Writing is certainly not HARD work, but it DEFINITELY does force you to introspect A LOT, and that can be a different kind of challenge in and of itself to other kinds of hard work. You have to get very comfy exploring your own psyche to be a good writer with a long-term career 😀
Anyway. I’ll come back next week and do a (much shorter) update of what I’ve been working on while ignoring Touchstone/letting it percolate – including cover reveals and formal announcements for All The Things We Saved You From 😀 <3
In the meantime, have a fabulous week, and don’t forget that you can get the more daily, spontaneous updates and encouragement on Instagram, and if you enjoy the longer form updates, you can sign up for my newsletter 🙂