It’s here … About bloody time
“What’s here?” you ask yourself. What is the man drivelling on about this time? Is it armageddon? Is it Christmas? Perhaps it’s 10% off at the ‘all-you-can-eat wings and buffalo emporium.’ All wrong. Read on to learn more
Over a year ago now, I finally published my long gestating first novel. Havoc: a Merry Hell novel. Havoc was published in September 2018. It’d been a major undertaking, spending literally ‘years’ being beaten into shape. It had not so much leapt from my keyboard, as oozed. My friends and family had long-doubted I would ever finish it; let alone get the thing published. Then on September 1st 2018 something crazy happened. I proved them all wrong and put Havoc on sale to the world. A big day, I can tell you.
Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks, once the glow of the freshly published author had wained slightly, I asked myself a question, “What now?” Havoc was out in the wild. I’d done what I had set out to do. What would my next project be? Well, book two of course … dummy! Then a thought struck me. I’d produced my first book but hardly done it under proper conditions. I’d had no time limits imposed on myself; no deadlines to contend with. What if, for my second book, I treated it like I was a full-time author, it having the benefit of publishing the second book faster, while setting myself a real test to see if I really had what it takes.
So it was, in late October 2018 I set myself the challenge of completing and publishing the second book before the first anniversary of Havoc’s launch. Now, this was a major undertaking. I’m a self-published author who has a day job. Time would be tight. At that very moment I only had a very loose outline of what book two was going to be about. I had a few of scenes in my head and a couple of story arcs written in the back of a notebook but that’s all. I was really starting from scratch, with less than three hundred and sixty five days to do it.
“Challenge Accepted!” The first week was filled with planning. My sitting room wall, being the biggest blank space I own, was littered with post-it notes that plotted out the various journeys’ my characters were going to take. After about four days, a story plan started to emerge, one that I felt was a fitting sequel for Havoc. I then spent about two days transcribing those notes onto an A4 pad and drew up a chapter list - I had my story and writing could start in earnest!
At the time, I had little work on regarding my day-job, so I had the opportunity to forge ahead. I soon found the delight of writing I’d experienced with my first novel, and a myriad of characters and scenes flowed through me once more. As I have mentioned before, I love the sensation of spending days inside my own imagination. I don’t know if other writers have the same sensation, but the first draft is always the most fun. True, when you finally read it back you hope to heck no one will ever see it because it’s in a hell of a mess and practically incoherent. One change I should note. I started using Scrivener as my word processor. It’s allowed me to write in scenes, rather than chapters. A whole new world has opened up for me.
By around the middle of February 2019 I had finished the first draft. It came in a little heavy at 130,000 words or so. I then spent a month or so re-drafting like a maniac to get it in to some sort of order. The word count dropped to a more reasonable 120,000. That was done by a line-by-line review as I got my computer to read it all back to me. By the end of March I was ready for my first edit. I compiled my manuscript out of Scrivener and sent it off. A long nervous month then crawled by as I awaited the outcome. At the tail end of April I got it back and then the real work began. Editors are not paid to be nice to you. They are there to show you what you got wrong, where the story needs work and where things need to be cut.
At the beginning of May 2019 I started on the third draft, taking into consideration everything my editor had pointed out. It was a long and laborious process. When an editor does their first review they don’t say, “this is wrong, that is miss-spelled or you should cut this.” In the first review of the text they point to themes and story arcs that need improvement. This makes things complicated. The editor is invariably right, but the implementation can be far from easy. Say the editor tells you that the mood of one story arc is wrong. To change that ‘mood’ it might require a re-write of multiple passages. Couple that together with the fact that the editor will express concerns with nearly every aspect of the book, and that leads to some very complicated re-writes.
It took nearly five months to pull it all together in draft three. This was not helped by being busy at the time with my ‘day job’. Anyway, by the beginning of September I had a draft I was confident could move on to the next process. It was also with a sad heart, I realised I had missed my self-imposed deadline. Book two had failed to launch within the year. Brushing that disappointment aside, I sent my latest draft off for copy edit. This is the edit where all the spelling, punctuation and formatting errors are picked up. It’s also a last chance to see if I had got the story right. It always amazes me how many errors I can get into my writing. I won’t embarrass myself by revealing the number but it’s an awful lot. Dyslexia aside, it seems I have a blind spot for commas. Several weeks ensued as I put right all the horrendous errors listed by my editor. (For those who are interested, the final error was a semi-colon instead of a colon on the final page. Now there’s detail you don’t get from most writers). Anyway, with that last correction done, book two had arrived at its final draft.
The rest should be easy, you say. Surely it’s just a simple process of uploading to Amazon. Oh, how I wish it were. This is always the process I hate the most. It’s difficult, time consuming and nerve wracking. Everything comes down to these couple of web pages where you enter all the details about your book. Get it wrong and everything is laid bare for the world to see. Can you imagine the horror of accidentally publishing the wrong draft? I have nightmares about that. Last year with Havoc, it took several months to build the book in Adobe Indesign and then lay it out correctly for Amazon’s uploader. Knowledge is a wonderful thing, they say. With that memory in mind, I decided to go a different path. I had Scrivener. It could take up the heavy lifting that Indesign did for Havoc. Although it was another learning curve, Scrivener’s was far shallower. With its help, it took only a couple of days to arrive at versions for the eBook and Paperback. The cover design was a similar experience to last year. i.e. It didn’t fit. It wasn’t even close. But with the experience of last year, I quickly resolved the error inside a day. All in all, the manuscript and artwork were uploaded and accepted in about four days.
Anyway, what this post has been leading up to is, drum roll please:
Blast: Merry Hell Book Two
has landed; it’s finished. Done, dusted, finito. It’s online and available to buy from Amazon now! I would like to thank Joanna, Cristina, Toby and Stuart for helping it come to life. I’d also like to thank the encouragement of my family and friends who said some very nice things, even though they weren’t being paid to. In the end, it took me slightly less than a year and two months, from start to finish. It’s been quite a ride and I’m rather proud of the out come. See for yourself … and order a copy today.
Writing truly is a great deal of fun - even if I do moan about it all the time.