Lessons Learned: Three Arachnids in a Warship (to say nothing of the human)
Jay is an aristocrat, a philanthropist, and a giant spider.
She also has only two years to live, which is disappointing. Her doctor has ordered rest and relaxation, so a spin around the galaxy in the old warship seems ideal. For the next week, Jay must try to relax in spite of her friend Oliver, who may or may not be a smuggler, her human companion Sarah who cannot resist playing practical jokes and her intense but extremely attractive friend Bainbridge. On her way she will encounter bigoted venomous snakes, vicious pirates, and a very rude serial killer. Thankfully, these are easy to deal with. The real trick will be keeping the secret behind her treatment from her companions.
Genre: Science Fiction Comey
How good do I think this book is, looking back on it? 9/10
I love this book. I’m so proud of it. It’s essentially what I wanted Confessions to be. It’s Confessions but easier to read, with more compelling characters, a better plot, and more coherent emotional arcs.
How obviously depressed was I during the writing? 7/10
My mental illness starts creeping back into my work here. I wrote this book over about four years, starting immediately after Confessions and wrapping up sometime after An Angel Named Susan. That’s a lot of time for depression to leak into a book.
Background
After wrapping up Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid, my wife asked me if I’d ever read Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I replied that I hadn’t. I got one of those looks, so I read it and found the funniest book I’d read in years. My inspiration for the sequel to Confessions had arrived.
The failure of Confessions really helped focus me in on what I wanted to do with Three Arachnids in a Warship. I considered Milligan’s story essentially done, so I switched the focus to a new protagonist. This let me even out the narration a bit and make it less opaque for readers not familiar with Wodehouse & Jerome.
I planned out a lot of this book whilst in the bath. Our shower broke over winter and I took a lot of baths whilst waiting to get it fixed. During this time I learned the creative power of relaxing and letting the mind wander. Admittedly, the structure of ThreeNids really encourages this loose freeform approach to storytelling. In the early versions, characters would enter and leave the story with little fanfare. My publisher got me to even things out a bit, have characters reoccur throughout the novel and show some genuine progress.
I don’t actually have a whole lot to say about ThreeNids, mainly because production was pretty smooth. It was slow, but there were relatively few roadblocks.
Post Release
Sadly, as with Confessions, ThreeNids is just too weird to see any real success. It got some traction on Insta, but without some serious money put behind promotion it won’t see much beyond that. It remains one of my favourite books, and a wonderful advert for the old ‘write whatever makes you happy’ advice.
Lessons Learned
1) Plot elements need to pay off
I’d intuited my way into this advice earlier in my career – the old Chekov’s Gun. If the audience see a gun on the wall in the first act, it must be fired in the third act. That whole thing. This sketch plays with the idea:
Usually, setup and payoff were easy for me, but in a book as meandering and slow moving as Three Arachnids in a Warship, I had to work at it. This was good, because it really focussed me on the whys, the wheres and the hows of setup and payoff.
2) Sometimes, taking a break from commercial writing is wonderful
By ‘commercial writing’, I mean ‘a novel that might conceivably be able to land me an agent’. I was under no illusions, when I wrote ThreeNids, that it was a project dead in the water from the moment it was conceived. This meant I didn’t promote it as well as I should have done, mainly because I didn’t see the point after Confessions, but it also meant its failure didn’t hurt as much. I wrote ThreeNids for me. If other people enjoy it, that’s lovely.
3) Persistence pays
The jump in my writing quality between Confessions and ThreeNids is remarkable. This isn’t particularly surprising as the books released five years apart, so you’re seeing five years of progress between the two. Still, it’s nice to know I am actually getting better at this writing lark as I go on.