Books that never made it to print: An Angel Named Susan

INCI LAJANI is a newly qualified priestess of Dusk who helps her friends steal a ship so they can escape a dark coming of age ritual. When she wakes up with cloudy memories of her own death, she initially assumes she’s had a religious experience. The ship is oddly changed though, and she becomes increasingly confused. She attempts to investigate, but before she’s able to make any headway, she is killed again. As the cycle starts over, she will have to push herself to the very limits in order to survive long enough to uncover the truth.

Genre: Young Adult Dark Fantasy

How good do I think this book is, looking back on it?      5/10

I love the ideas Angel deals with, I love the story, I love the characters. The way it’s actually written leaves a lot to be desired. I chose to write it in present tense, which made sense at the time because the protag dies a lot, and that’s tricky in past tense. The thing is… I think present tense and I don’t get on. The immediacy of the narrative made things get a little ‘authorial voice’-y. I re-read my favourite section of the book just now and was surprised by how a lot of the writing just doesn’t work on a base technical level. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I finished this book before starting work on Drown the Witch because the nuts and bolts of the writing are much better in DTW.

How obviously depressed was I during the writing?        3/10

As with Drown the Witch, Inci isn’t a depressed protagonist. She has other stuff going on, and this manifests in occasional moments which makes it clear what was going on in my head at the time, but generally it’s a depression-free book.

Background

I’d got back into anime after my honeymoon, and if there’s one law of watching anime it’s that everyone, at some point, needs to try watching One Piece. It’s a giant of the genre.

Now, I never liked One Piece, but I do like some of its ideas. One idea in particular really stuck with me – the idea of someone so weighed down by grief that they’d do horrifying things just to lift that weight. So I decided to write a book about that.

Learning from DTW, I decided to set the book in a fantasy version of Iran (one culture, rather than three), meaning that I was able to focus in on certain customs and habits that gave the world a good sense of depth.

I also, miracle of miracles, planned the entire thing out before I started writing. My first plan was a disaster – I realised that my protagonist and antagonist didn’t really spend any time together until the final act, which meant that the first two acts were essentially one big stall. I tossed that plan and started again.

One interesting thing that happened during editing was… the editor who worked on Drown the Witch with me read the book and… let me dramatize the conversation a little:

Editor:   Do you know what you’ve done with the antagonist?

Me:        Yeah, I was going for sort of an addiction thing – they’re addicted to doing these horrible things so they can be with the people they love.

Editor:   That’s not what I meant. Your antagonist is an abuser.

Me:        Say what?

Editor:   They do x, y and z to the protag, all whilst claiming to be their friend. That’s abusive behaviour.

Me:        Ah…

 So I learned a lot about abuse whilst writing this book.

Generally, I think it’s both a really amazing book, and actually kinda terrible both at the same time. Structurally, it’s extremely repetitive and I go back and forth on whether this is an actual problem or not. The book is essentially (but not quite) a time loop story and those are, by their nature, repetative. The key is to keep things fresh for an audience by introducing new plot threads and switching up the loops regularly to make sure the audience can’t settle into a comfortable rhythm for too long, as it’s only a short step from ‘comfortable rhythm’ to ‘boredom’.

I made two mistakes with my repetative structure - first, I set almost the entire book on one ship. This meant exploring the same locations again and again. This isn’t necessarily bad, but in a fantasy novel where the possibilities are endless it’s a bit of a missed oppertunity. When the antagonist catches the protag and imprisons her so they can have a dramatic chat, I chose to have that chat take place in the engine room of the ship rather than, say, a glass cage suspended over a volcano. See what I mean? Missed oppertunity.

The second structural mistake I made was - I was too rigid with the time loops. Early on, I decided that the mcguffin that could bring characters back to life could only do so for three days at a time. That meant for multiple loops I struggled to find a way to fill those three days. Multiple times I cheated and contrived a way for the loops to end early, which really should have been a sign that this ‘three day’ thing was causing more problems that it was solving. It would probably have been better to have the loops just be of variable lengths based on some arbitary limiting factor that was initially unknown to the protag. This sense of the unknown would keep the time pressure up, as the protag would never be sure when a loop is going to end. That pressure might cause its own problems, but it’s better than having the loops be an arbitary length and have the pacing be quite loose and directionless as a result.

These two problems aren’t necessarily disasters. What is a disaster is the lack of a Lancer in the book, meaning the protag spends almost the entire time alone. This makes the narration repetitive and insular. Usually, I find writing in first person liberating and wonderful. In An Angel Named Susan, the protagonist’s perspective is only irregularly elevated by other characters.

This is, sadly, a problem that isn’t really solvable without turning the book into something else entirely. There are a couple of characters who I could bring in as the Lancer, but the sections of the book where the protag is being abused just don’t work if she has backup. The protag has to be alone for the story to work.

Now, if I had a truly amazing editor, we could solve these problems together. Sadly, such an editor would cost far more money than I’m willing to spend on repairing the book, especially considering so many agents have already passed on it. If I get picked up, I may revisit the idea but until then, it’s dead in the water.

Submission

Angel was in no way ready for submission when I sent it out. It had serious problems which I was completely unaware of - I thought it was amazing. The best thing I’d ever written. I submitted it to even more agents than I submitted Drown the Witch to. None of them even asked for a full manuscript. After the amount of rejection I’d already experienced, this fully broke me. The majority of the blame for this lies with me. I knew I had a habit of sending things out too early, but I really believed in the book. As far as I was concerned, I’d done my due dilligence. I’d worked with multiple editors and they’d both signed off on it - except it turned out the pro editor who I’d thought had signed off on it, hadn’t actually done that, she was just terrible at communicating. Except maybe she did sign off on it and only thought of the glaringly obvious problems in hindsight?

Post-submission

Angel was the second book I wrote in the world that I started with Drown the Witch. I kept the book in the digital equivalent of a desk drawer, with the idea that if a subsequent book got picked up I could go ‘heeeey, this?’ Since making that decision, I’ve gone back to the book multiple times to check on how I think it works and the conclusion I’ve recently come to is… if I want to do something with it, I need to re-write it from the ground up. Every single word needs to go. This is partly because it’s structurally very flawed and partly because the nuts and bols of the writing aren’t very good. If only one of these problems existed, I’d consider the current version salvageable, albeit with heavy revisision required. Given both problems are so serious I think it would be quicker and easier to start again using the current version as a jumping off point.

Changes I would consider making:

1) Write it in past tense

This would generally calm the style down a bit.

2) Vary the structure and pacing way more

Have the loops be varying lengths, vary the locations more… generally increase the sense of variety.

3) Slim down the number of characters

In the book as it stands the ship has seven crew - the protag and antag, a minor antag, a stuffy commander, a caring doctor, a rebelious punk and a sensitive poet. Only about half of these characters are actually necessary for the story, which led to the punk, the commander and the poet being almost entirely absent from the narrative. If I cut them, I can really focus on getting the characters that are there nailed down.

4) Insert a Lancer

I have no idea how I’d do this, but an editor would be able to help there.

5) Mess about with the sexuality of the characters

In the current book, there’s a love story between the protag and another woman. It’s a coming out story and it’s… fine. There’s not much drama to it because there are no stakes, and… the story basically goes ‘a gay character has her sexuality revealed to her by a caring woman who becomes her partner’. There’s no tension, no back and forth. It’s a linear journey from ‘protag thinks she’s straight but isn’t’ to ‘protag discovers she’s gay and that’s lovely’.

What I think would be more interesting to do is to have the protag be the one who’s secure in her sexuality, and to have her love interest be closeted. I’m not sure about this, and would need to do a lot of reading before I committed to it, but to me it feels like a more interesting source of drama, and less of a classic 90s coming of age story.

Lessons Learned:

1)      Your protagonist and antagonist need to interact a lot

In Drown the Witch, who the antagonist actually is can be a bit woolly. Is the antagonist the murderer who stalks the characters in the first half of the book? Is the antagonist the cabal of witches who threaten the protags life? Is it the humans who wish to hurt the Lancer? Any or all of the above?

With Angel, I made sure to put the protagonist and antagonist relationship front and centre, which was great. What was less great is that relationship supplanted the relationship between the protagonist and the lancer. It’s a tricky balance.

2)      The wrong editor is a waste of time and money

It took me a long time to realise that the professional editor I hired for Angel was either very bad at her job or terrible at communicating (which, for an editor, is just another way of saying she was very bad at her job). I worked with that same editor on the book I’ve just finished, and I spend most of last year undoing the damage she did to that book. That editor did have some really good ideas, I should make that clear, but if I’d worked with an editor who actually talked to me and knew what she was talking about, I might have actually got somewhere with Angel. A bad relationship with an editor costs a lot of money and leads to a great deal of frustration and anger. There’s also an oppertunity cost. You can only submit a book to an agent once, unless they specificly say they’re happy to take another look at the thing. That means that, if your editor signs off on a book, but it’s not ready, that means you lose out on a potential agent.

3)      Sense of place

Angel was the first book where I realised just how lacking my descriptions of environments were. The first few pages contained six locations, and I described two of them. I used to think spending ages banging on about the colour of the wallpaper was a complete waste of time, on top of being a pacing killer. I still think that to a certain extent, but it’s important to not conclude that description in general is a waste of time, just because literary fiction writers tend to spend too much time on it.

4)      Present Tense is a bit of a nightmare

I decided to write Angel in present tense and it broke my brain a little. It made sense for the project but I wish I’d never made that decision because it took me nearly a year to get tenses straight in my head after that.

5) Knowing when to submit is one of the most important skills a writer can have

And it’s one that, to this day, I still don’t have.