May 2024

May has been a month of many projects.

After I finished Hero draft 2, it sat in a drawer for two weeks (well, it sat in a folder on my laptop). During that time, I focused entirely on Green and had quite a few 1000+ word writing days. Act 1 is done for now, though it needs a slower start, and some characters need to be fleshed out a bit before the murder part of the murder mystery kicks into gear. It’s currently sitting at 34,259 words, though progress is about to slow down for a few weeks…

Two Hero-less weeks passed by, and then was readthrough time. Notes are digital this time; longhand wasn’t too kind on my hands, plus I’m combining a couple of “notes for later” documents. It’s fun to scrutinise everything, and my colour-coding is no longer limited by how many pens I can find. Until recently, I was comfortably reading 1000 words of Hero and writing 1000 words of Green per day. The trouble with this method is that when you’re running two marathons at once, you run them both at half speed.

Hero is about 138,000 words. Even reading 1000 words a day, that’s about four more months of work (it took two months to read draft 1, with no other projects to compete with it). 1000 words a day on Green would get me to finish in just over two months… if I can keep the pace up. Green is being written mostly patchwork style at present, so it’s only a matter of time before I hit a wall and need to step back to do some planning. I found that I was putting down words just to fill the word count – the passion wasn’t there. My numbers look great on the spreadsheets, but I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere fast.

I’m not sure what June will hold, but I think I need to get the Hero readthrough done first. If it takes me four months to finish, I’ll have forgotten half the story by the time I’m finished! Green still needs to stay fresh, but I can’t give them both equal energy. Weekly targets will be lowered for that one. Speaking of projects competing for attention…

In my April update post, I opined that murder mysteries and historical fiction are the hardest to write. Green is a sort-of murder mystery… and now I’ve landed myself with a sort-of historical novel. The working title is Storm, and it’s a bit of a mashup of different things but requires a solid basis of history knowledge. I have a few characters and a sliver of plot, and I’m super excited to work on it. For now, I’m writing snippets as they happen and carrying out exploratory research. Get in line, pal. I can’t write three projects at once.

Ice Hot is now available to preorder from Obverse Books! An anthology of stories set in Paradise Towers, from Doctor Who’s 1987 episode of the same name. Sylvester McCoy is one of my favourite Doctors, so it was a thrill to write in a world from his era. The Towers is populated with rulebook-abiding Caretakers, teenage gangs of Kangs and robot cleaners that occasionally kill people. There are some great stories in here, including one written by Stephen Wyatt, writer of the original episode. My story, The Caretaker, focuses on the youngest Caretaker and the last surviving Yellow Kang (spoiler: neither of them survive episode one). Expect a full post about it when it’s released.

In writing-adjacent news, earlier this month I met A.F. Steadman at a book signing of Skandar and the Chaos Trials! I discovered the series through the audiobooks, which are fantastically narrated by David Dawson (all the characters have unique voices). It’s a middle-grade fantasy series about bloodthirsty unicorns, with some similar tropes to “dragon rider school” fantasy stories.

Yes, the queue consisted mostly of parents and excited ten-year-olds. Shout-out to the lady in front of me, who told her child to grab an extra activity booklet when she overheard me being too shy to get one.

A.F. Steadman is lovely. She took the time to chat with everyone – and everyone wanted to chat with her. I had already listened to the audiobook before buying the book that day, so I could gush about it in suitable fangirl fashion. (My allied element is water. I know this because I did the quiz in the activity booklet.) When I met Brandon Sanderson and R.F. Kuang, I basically said, “Your book made me cry, it was awesome” so at least I sounded coherent this time. It’s going to probably be a year until book 4, but I’ll be first in line to preorder. The best books I’ve read this year.

Writing gives you an appreciation of what an achievement a novel is, especially one that touches you, brings you joy, or makes you wonder what your destined unicorn’s name would be. Sometimes it feels like Hero will never be finished, but at the same time it feels strangely inevitable. The path is long, and someone should really fill in the p(l)otholes, but it’s still a path. It’s time to ease off on other projects for a bit, and take a closer look at the map. Hey, that mountain seems new…

Thoughts?

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