Lessons Learned: Drown the Witch

Susan Fletcher has been hired to infiltrate a secret society of witches. Her contact promises fame, fortune, and protection from the fallout. Now Susan’s contact is dead, murdered by one of the people she threatened to expose. Can Susan uncover the murderer, escape the mansion of monsters and, above all, keep the witches from discovering that she's not one of them?'

Genre: Young Adult Dark Fantasy

How good do I think this book is, looking back on it?      7/10

This is the oldest of my catalogue that I’d still consider reading. It has its problems but overall it’s pretty good. I re-read my favourite parts occasionally and I’ve definitely improved a lot when it comes to the nuts and bolts of writing. Plenty of exchanges in DTW go like this:

Character A straightened her tie, “I told you never to come back here, Professor Freckles!” she said.

“Yes,” said Professor Freckles, “but I wasn’t listening.” The professor arched an eyebrow.

The sentences could all use tightening up and smoothing out. A good line edit would have probably raised it to an 8/10.

How obviously depressed was I during the writing?        0/10

Depression doesn’t show up at all in the text, which is honestly rather surprising given I was cripplingly depressed for basically the entire time I wrote it. I think, having written Whispering of Black Anis about depression, I was keen to write about basically anything else.

Background

Years before I’d started writing, my wife and I had written an RPG set in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade. It was a murder mystery where the players would split up and talk to three different GMs to try and establish who did the murders. It was a fun time, and I decided to adapt the story to a novel.

At this stage, I was pretty confident that I knew how getting an agent worked, but I also knew how difficult the task actually was. So, I hatched a plan. I would write a series of books set in the same world with minor crossovers, in the style of Discworld. The idea was that if an agent picked up one book, I could go ‘oh you liked that? Well, I also have this, this and this set in the same world.’

I’d also been playing a lot of The Witcher 3 when I wrote Drown the Witch. I remember being really impressed by Skellige – the civilisation of Irish mountain Vikings. I took inspiration from this and made Selen, the city DTW is set in, a fusion of Greek, English, and Indian inspirations. The idea was that I’d create a fantasy city that felt grounded, because it had real world elements the reader would be familiar with, but it would also be something different than your standard steampunk city based on Victorian London.

In my opinion, this aspect of the book doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Yes, the characters are all dark skinned (other than one), but they all have white Anglo-Saxon names. Oh, scratch that. One character has a Japanese names and two have the surname ‘Singh’. Truly a masterpiece of diverse storytelling (/s). Still, as a first attempt it wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

I wrote the first draft of Drown the Witch before I started work on Whispering. That draft was aimed at adults. The protagonist was an Iain Hislop type - a journalist who was well past their prime, but had fully bought into their own hype. Arrogant to the point of farce. A joke to everyone except themselves. They were a wonderful protagonist to write, because they were so hateful, but a horrible protagonist to read. My first major piece of feedback from my friends came in the universal message ‘I want to strangle your protagonist’.

After writing Whispering, I went back to Drown the Witch, re-writing it from the ground up as a young adult book. The new version worked much better - the protagonist’s arrogance still reared its head occasionally but it was much more interesting to have an eighteen year old protagonist who thinks she knows how the world works and then suddenly thrust into the unknown than it is to have the same thing happen to Iain Hislop.

Most of the story stayed intact from what my wife and I had written years before. I added in a bunch of lore, tweaked the characters and really focussed in on the relationships between the protagonist and the lancer. This was the core of the novel, and I think it worked pretty well. I also had my first crack at including a canonically trans character, which went okay, although they’re barely in it.

It’s quite a slow moving book. Much of it is set in one house, which makes sense for a murder mystery, but my favourite parts happen at the midpoint, where the protag leaves the house and is given the choice to flee, or to get help for the Lancer. I struggle writing stories where the scale creeps out of my control. I like having a nice, confined location where my characters can really express themselves. In Drown the Witch, that desire to stick to one location meant things got pretty samey pretty quickly, which was a problem.

One area where I think the book is definitely lacking comes in the form of the antagonist - or rather antagonists. There isn’t a single antagonist in DTW - there are three. Society at large, the secret society of witches that would murder the protag if she were to be discovered, and the murderer whose scheme the protag is trying to foil. These three characters slide in and out of the novel in order to keep a sense of threat going, but I’m not sure that aspect of the book works.

I also did the thing which TV murder mysteries often do, where I just kept the character that did the murders away from the main narrative as much as possible so they wouldn’t seem like much of a suspect. The protagonist never even speaks to the murderer directly - the murderer is questioned by the lancer off screen. I consider this lazy writing when done in a TV show and was something I was keen not to repeat when I wrote my second murder mystery Not in My Name.

Finally, I think it’s interesting how my writing has progressed when focussing on the universe this book is set in. The protagonist doesn’t know magic is a thing in DTW, which made sense at the time, but in every subsequent book I’ve had my protagonists already know about magic, to a greater or lesser extent, which means that there could be some continuity problems between DTW and the rest of the series. Here DTW’s protag is, freaking out when she finds out magic is real, whilst my other protags are all ‘yeah, whatevs’. It’s not an insolvable problem - I could retcon it by saying that Selen, the city state Drown the Witch is set in, has essentially cut itself off from trade from the outside world, so it doesn’t necessarily know certain facts about how the world works. Not the most convincing piece of world building in existence, but it kinda works.

Submission

I submitted DTW to around 50 agents. I got a request for a full manuscript, but nothing came of that request. To this date, that is still the most successful any of my projects have been, which is crushingly sad. The cavalcade of rejections really rocked me, and took my faith in my writing career to lows from which it has never really recovered. To be clear, however, DTW was not ready for submission. I’d had the thing edited, but by an amateur who was only able to paper over the cracks. It’s a good book, and I’m proud of it, but if I’d spent a year working on it with the right editor it could have been great. Sadly, instead I chose to self-publish it.

The Release

Self-publishing is a nightmare. I hated it. Doing the layout, the proof reading and all the other hundred tiny things that needed to get done was like pulling teeth. 0/10, would not recommend.

Post Release

DTW was reviewed pretty decently by those that read it. It was less divisive than Confessions. I’ve sold 100+ copies of the thing, which is terrible by industry standards, and I made a serious loss on the project, but I’m happy with those sales. I got some art made up for the book and used that for Facebook advertising.

Lessons Learned:

1)      Get an editor on board earlier

For your work to achieve its full potential, you need to get an editor on board once you have a first draft completed. I didn’t do that, and wouldn’t learn that particular lesson until Not in My Name, but I did, eventually, learn it.

2)      To write diversely, it’s not enough to make the characters non-Caucasian

Varied skin tones do not a diverse text make. I was unhappy with how the world of Selen had turned out, and decided to do better with my next book.

3)      Self-publishing isn’t for me

Yes, Jodi Taylor and Andy Wier were successful at self-publishing but my health prevents me from doing the endless publicity required to make it a success.

4)      Murder mysteries are super fun to write

This will come back in Not in My Name

5)      I love writing psychedelic moments

Some of my favourite sections of Drown the Witch are the parts when the protag is making her way through the security systems, and her perception of reality starts getting warped. I’m still really proud of the middle third of DTW because it boasts some truly excellent writing.

6)      Conflicting motivations leads to amazing writing

My favourite section of the DTW happens about half way through. The protagonist is desperate to maintain her cover – she knows she’ll be killed if she’s discovered. She had a choice – flee and be safe, or put herself in danger and send help to the person who would murder her if her true identity is known. She makes the choice to send help… and she gets caught.

I love that section so, so much. It’s still one of the best things I’ve written. Focussing in on that moment, as well as the psychedelic sections, really made me realise the sort of books I wanted to write.

7)      My protagonists need a lancer

In The Suicide Machines, the characters do spend time with each other, but they also spend a lot of time in their own heads. In Confessions, Milligan spends large parts of the book alone, in his own head. Whispering is almost entirely just Melody being sad and alone.

In Drown the Witch, I focussed in on the relationship between Susan and Alison and holy forking shirtballs the book was improved massively as a result. From that, I should have learned that my protag needs someone to bounce off. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn that lesson in time to prevent my second monumental cockup. More on that next week…