Lessons Learned: The Suicide Machines

Teleporters transport you from one place to another, right? Wrong. Lieutenant Andrea Carlson has just discovered she is five minutes old. Born anew in a spaceship's teleporter, complete with memories of her past lives. So many past lives. The teleporters have been killing her and everyone else who used them again and again and again. But as news spreads through her ship, along with technophobia and death cults, Andrea's just a little too busy to worry about the suicide machines.

Genre: Science Fiction

How good do I think this book is, looking back on it?      6/10

It’s got a bunch of nice ideas in it, and there’s some genuinely good writing in there, but there are too many characters and it badly needed an editor.

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

Some of the characters occasionally display depressive symptoms but overall the text is much more interested in delving into ideas of political dogma and sectarianism.

Background

When I started writing the book that would, after many revisions, become The Suicide Machines, I was working in a hospital and I was deeply, deeply ill. I had severe chronic depression, an anxiety disorder and chronic fatigue syndrome, none of which I knew about. The gory details would fill an entire post by themselves but put it this way – I was regularly having to go and lie on the floor in a toilet cubicle for 40+ minutes because I was too tired to be at my desk.

Years before, I’d had the idea for a story. It was going to be about a civilisation that relied on teleportation, and the economic collapse that followed when it turned out teleportation copied the user, then destroyed the original. I didn’t end up following through on that idea, because it turned out I knew nothing about economics. It would be half a decade until I worked out how full of shirt most economists were, so I probably could have given it a go and it would have been fine, but making the change to set it in a post-scarcity society was a better idea.

So, one day, I opened up a word document and started writing. I did this every day for months. Sometimes, I’d only write a few words, some days I’d write entire chapters. Most days I still got my work done, and on the days that I didn’t, it was because I was too ill to work, so it was a choice between doing some writing, and hoping things improved, or going home. Of course, now I know I should have just gone home, but I didn’t then. I was using writing to cope with how terrible I was feeling.

Anyway, I wrapped up version one (then called ‘The Unexpected Life of a Diplomat’, because Luther, my diplomat character, was much more present in that version), and sent it out to a few agents. None of them took me on because this version of the book was 52,000 words long. At the time, I didn’t know that a novel was supposed to be 70,000 words minimum.

One of my friends had heard about a small publisher that was accepting submissions, so I sent the book to them. They liked it, but said they wouldn’t take it on at that length. We had a chat and decided that I’d re-write the thing, focussing on the first third of ‘The Unexpected Life of a Diplomat’. I started work the same day. On the book, I mean. I probably also did some of the work the hospital were paying me for as well, but honestly, I was so completely out of it whilst I was there, I can’t say for sure.

I finished up ‘The Unexpected Death of a Soldier’ later that same year, and sent it back to the publisher. They gave it the world’s most lazy proof read, gave it a cover which was… okay, and published it.

The Release

Honestly, the fact that the book was barely edited should have raised my suspicions. The publisher turned out to be one man working out of a basement near Birmingham. Single person publishers can be vibrant and energetic (more on that when we get to Not in My Name), but Rob, who ran the publishing ‘company’ had neither the energy nor the money to run a micro-publisher. Once the book was out in the world, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. A bunch of my friends and family reviewed the thing, which was very kind of them. The book then sank without a trace.

One interesting thing that happened in my personal life during the release was: I went to the doctor, because I woke up to the fact that I’d been very depressed for a long time. He told me to come back in a month. I went back in a month, and he believed me – in part because I told him that my first book had come out and I felt… nothing. I knew it was an objectively good thing to have happened, but I didn’t have an emotional reaction to the news. It was just another Thursday.

Post Release

The publisher ceased trading after a few years, although it would be more accurate to say it had ceased trading almost immediately after publishing the three full-length novels it had published around 2014. Thankfully, on the advice of my wife, I’d put a clause in the contract that made sure the rights reverted to me in the event of such a thing happening. Years later, when I had a few more books written, I took a copy of ‘The Unexpected Death of a Soldier’ that I had lying around and started crossing out anything that was superfluous to the narrative. I cut out 10,000 words without breaking a sweat. One of my friends informed me, sadly, that I cut out all his favourite bits. I self-published the book under the name ‘The Suicide Machines’ (a much better title) and here we are. To this day, very few people have read it and as a book… it’s fine.

Lessons learned:

1)      Novels are 70,000+ words long.

I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing when I wrote The Suicide Machines. I don’t know what I’m doing in life, generally, but this was particularly true of my first book. I learned a lot about how to submit to agents as part of the initial process. These days, I find those early, stumbling submissions comforting, because they act as a reminder that a large number of submissions agents get are from people who don’t know what on earth they’re doing.

 2)      Getting a micro-publisher is easy. Getting a good micro-publisher is very, very hard

Plenty of people think they can write a novel without putting any work in. It turns out, there’s a significant number of people who think they can be a micro-publisher without putting any work in either. My experience with that tiny publisher was not positive. I’d probably have been better off self-publishing the thing, but it looked good on my writing CV, and the validation of having someone else like my work was extremely valuable. I might not have continued to write had my first book not been picked up.

 3)      Writing can get you through some extremely dark times

I had the first of three epic flameouts whilst working for that hospital. If I hadn’t been writing my book, I probably would have crashed and burned much sooner. Along with the relationship I had with my wife, writing that book was one of two good things in my life at that time. Creative outlets are important