Podcast, Disability, Fiction

I learned something about myself today.

Last week, I recorded a podcast with the wonderful people behind Hidden Gems Books. It’s about disability in fiction, and my experience with portraying an invisible disability in a book. You can watch it here:

The thing is, I can’t listen to it. I’m too scared. This is new for me. I’m the sort of person who enjoys listening to themselves talk. I’ve listened back to my project on Sherlock is Garbage and Here’s Why multiple times, and I’ve done the same with the Doctor Who project I did last year. But I can’t listen to that podcast.

I don’t know exactly why, but I think it’s because I really care about disability generally, and disability in fiction in specific. I feel that the disabled community are being let down by art in general in a big way, and fiction takes a big slice of the blame there. And I loved being able to talk about it, but I’m worried I forked it up, or sounded like a know-it-all, or just jabbered on endlessly.

It feels as if this matters. The question ‘Is Sherlock is Garbage and Here’s Why a terrible video essay’ is both straightforward (yes, it’s terrible), and it also doesn’t particularly matter. Whereas disability in fiction genuinely does matter, and it’s possibly my first time talking about something that I know a decent amount about, but far, far less than I’d like to. I’ll have made errors, said the wrong thing, oversimplified…

But hey. At least I talked about it. At least Hidden Gems Books let me talk about it.

Ableism in Machine Learning Algorithms

I’m using Midjourney to generate some character images for a project. Yes, I know Midjourney exploits artists. yes, I know it’s bad generally. The thing is - I have aphantasia. Midjourney is genuinely a really useful tool for me. I would love to be able to pay an artist to make concept art for me. I can’t afford that, because my disability has left me with very little money. This is how capitalism hurts artists in every way it can.

Anyway, I was trying to generate images of steampunk students with various disabilities. Midjourney was…. okay at some of them, but I ran into this funny/depressing issue when I tried to get it to output a student with facial scarring.

I could get significant facial scarring whilst having the student scowling and being really grim and serious

This is the result for the prompt: “a happy pale-skinned steampunk student with severe burn scars”

And this was the result for: “a smiling pale-skinned steampunk student with severe burn scars”

And… notice how we’ve gone from… androgynous but vaguely masculine scowling and severely burned people, to definitely more gender coded smiling people with barely any facial scarring?

So, I thought… okay. Let’s do a minor variant on an image. So I picked this image:

Prompt: “a happy pale-skinned steampunk student with severe burn scars”

And told Midjourney to do a minor variation, with the prompt: “a happy smiling pale-skinned steampunk student with severe burn scars”

And…. oh, look, almost all of the scars are gone. And they’re all femme coded now.

Midjourney apparently can’t conceive of a world where someone could have serious facial scarring, and be generally a happy person. Or even just smiling because they heard a joke or something.

That’s really forked up.

Publication Day for The Hungry Dark

The Hungry Dark is now published. This one’s been a long road.

The story behind the book is very long and I’m too tired to get into it. But it’s now out, and I’m proud of it. I think it’s good.

My faith in that opinion has been shaken by the advance reviews I received – the majority of which are three star reviews where the text is mostly ‘meh, wasn’t for me, characters weren’t great’. This… is concerning.

It’s tempting to write reviews such as this off, for reasons I’ll get to in a second. However, I’m deeply suspicious of my instinct to do this. “These people don’t know what they’re talking about, I’m definitely a genius and my work is perfect, and they’re clearly… I don’t know… what sort of books are we supposed to sneer at currently? Harriet Spiggot fans. They’re all Harriet Spiggot fans who wouldn’t know a good novel if it sat on their faces,” says the defensive writer.

Essentially, I’ve worked on this book for years, so it’s especially tempting to think “I’ve done a lot of work on this, therefore it must be good.” Anyone should be able to spot the logical fallacy at the heart of that statement.

I, personally, think there’s something to this idea I have that these three star reviewers just… didn’t get the book. This is best exemplified by a snippet from one review:

“The book mentions that Melita suffers from a chronic illness, and whilst the descriptions of the actual symptoms were very well done, the illness hardly seemed to affect her after the first chapter. I think including more of these struggles would have helped flesh Melita out a bit more as a character, as I found her hard to connect with. Her actions also felt rather nonsensical, and even contrary at times, which was quite frustrating to read. I didn't really understand her stoic pacifism - and it often just came across like blunt stupidity and self-sacrifice without good reason.” – a reviewer.

So, reading that, what I hear is: “I didn’t pick up on any of the depictions of Melita’s illness after the first chapter.” The reviewer more or less says this directly – Melita’s relationship with pacifism is a core part of the book, and its relationship with her illness is discussed in several key scenes. Several times in the story she’s so burned out she can’t even move. She constantly throws herself into danger because of maladaptive coping strategies. She, and I can’t believe I have to point this out, tries to kill herself on two seperate occasions. I find the idea that her illness doesn’t affect her after the first chapter absolutely baffling.

I suspect that certain readers didn’t understand the depiction of mental health in The Hungry Dark, and weren’t particularly curious about what they saw as contradictions, or lack of depth. There’s something I, as a writer, could do about this – I could make Melita’s journey much clearer.

The only problem is, I already have. I had several chats with industry people about The Hungry Dark and something which came up repeatedly was they just didn’t get the mental health stuff. One person really didn’t understand why a character named Kinta was present in the story. Kinta was always supposed to be an (even more) maladaptive mirror to the protagonist. In subsequent drafts, I made this clearer, even referring to Kinta as the protagonist’s twin. I really can’t make this stuff much clearer.

Plus, I know I shouldn’t make Melita’s experiences with mental health any clearer. A couple of reviewers have said things such as:

“My only real critique is in the writing itself, which is almost a little too earnest, starting with the subtitle and going from there. I appreciate the themes and ideas being explored--ideas of pacifism, self-worth, fitting in, selflessness and working for others, depression, chronic pain and disability, equality, and so on. I think they’re important and glad to see them. But they felt over-discussed. There were constantly explicit words being put to these ideas, instead of trusting in the writing and the readers both to get the message without repeatedly saying it.” - a reviewer.

I agree with every word in that quote. The reviewer is entirely correct. But you see the issue? For some readers the mental health issue just disappears after the first chapter, and for others it’s stated too bluntly. It’s too obvious. Over-discussed.

Sigh. I’m so tired.

Well, never mind. This is how it goes. The book’s out. During the course of writing The Hungry Dark I improved massively as a writer, I learned a great deal about the sort of material I want to write, and I healed my relationship with my own work. Since starting to write on the book, I’ve been cured of depression and Anxiety, I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, and I’ve become religious (which was a big surprise). I’m happy it’s out. I’m happy to move on now.

For anyone who might be interested, I made a soundtrack for the novel. I use soundtracks such as this to get myself into the right headspace whilst writing. The order of the songs roughly track the story. Here’s the playlist on Youtube Music, whilst here it is as an embed, although a couple of the tracks don’t work, for reasons which are beyond me:

And, finally, here are some images I used as inspiration for the novel at its genesis.

Making Yourself Miserable By Endlessly Editing

I’m feeling confident this morning. Relaxed. Settled. The reason for this is: I’ve found a piece of really terrible writing advice.

Here it is

It’s by Michelle Barker, author of several books, the most successful of which has 272 ratings on Goodreads. I provide this only for context. In case anyone thinks I’m looking down on Michelle, my most successful Goodreads book has 24 ratings. I’m no literary colossus, I’m just a person.

There are a few ways I could approach talking about this terrible advice, but I’ve got things to do, so I’m going to get the key parts out of the way. Michelle’s advice is this: If you have completed a developmental edit on your book, followed by a line edit, it still won’t be ready for publication. You need to go back and edit it again, and then again and again and again and so on.

I’m a big fan of revising novels. One of my favourite things is taking something which is already pretty good and making it way better than you thought was possible. However, this principle has definite limits. We’ll get to those later, but I need to start with a few quickfire objections to Michelle’s advice.

First: It’s Extremely Classist

Getting a book professionally edited is expensive. A developmental edit for a 70,000 word novel can cost between £600 and £900. Not necessarily the sort of money everyone can afford to drop on a hobby, especially if they have to do it multiple times.

Second: It’s Ableist as Fork

People with certain kinds of disability (to take a random example: mine) struggle with repeating the same task beyond a certain point. Michelle says as part of her editing process:

“I read it so many times I can almost tell you where to find a particular word (certainly the context in which I’ve used it, if not the precise page).”

Michelle, honey, not everyone can do that. To me, for example, because of my disability, asking me to do that would be like asking me to rub sandpaper on my brain. Similarly, saying ‘just get beta readers to look at your manuscript’ shuts out the millions of people who struggle with social situations.

Third: It’s Not A Process Which Produces Particularly Good Results

This point might be controversial. It’s might also be completely wrong, but it bears considering nonetheless. Michelle talks about every traditionally published book as if it’s gone through this process of being edited a hundred times. If that was true, I’d expect traditionally published books to be quite a lot better than they currently are.

I need to give my standard disclaimer, because saying things like that can make me sound really bitter: I am not a misunderstood literary genius. If you’ve read my Lessons Learned series, you’ll know I think most of my books which have been published are actually kinda bad. I do not believe that I have been denied a literary agent or a traditional publishing deal because of some grand injustice – I haven’t landed an agent because my work needed improving, and because I didn’t get extremely lucky.

So, back to the point. If you read many books, you’ll probably have noticed that a lot of them aren’t particularly good. Many have tedious opening chapters, others have flat characters, still others have plots which completely fall apart x% of the way through. If editing books over and over and over again actually worked, these issues would all have been spotted and fixed.

Now, most traditionally published books probably contain a higher standard of general writing than most self-published books. Again, I’m not saying ‘editing is bad’. I’m saying, ‘editing until your eyes bleed doesn’t make your book perfect’. Because, as I’ve talked about before ‘perfection’ is impossible in any artistic medium.

For an example of this, we might look at the fourth Wayfarers novel ‘The Galaxy and the Ground Within’. I didn’t enjoy it because it was so godamn slow and the thematic exploration of bigotry was no deeper than a classic Aunty Donna sketch. Do those objections make the book bad? Maybe. Do they stop people enjoying the book? Hell no, that book has 16,000 ratings on Goodreads and an average rating of 4.4 stars.

Ultimately, the advice ‘edit until your fingers are worn down to stubs’ ignores a fundamental truth of life: People enjoy different kinds of art. Take the passive voice, something editors hate. If you handed a book to a reader, and they enjoyed it but occasionally the text slipped into using the passive voice, unless the reader had an English Literature PhD, or was an author, I guarantee you they wouldn’t even notice. I’m friends with a bunch of voracious readers – none of us care if the books we read are written to an S-ranked technical standard, we care about clicking with characters and enjoying interesting stories. You don’t need to edit 100 times in order to make your characters engaging.

Fourth: It’s The Best Way Possible To Make You Fall Out Of Love With Writing

This point is extremely personal, and it won’t be true for everyone, but it’s still extremely important. I have actually followed Michelle’s advice on the book I had out for submission last year. I edited, I revised, I had the manuscript assessed and then the process began again. I went through countless revisions – genuinely countless.

Did those revisions make the book better? Some of them, yes, others just ended up fiddling around the edges, but my point is doing that many edits on one book made me absolutely despise it. I really, really hate that book now. This is partly because of my disability, but I doubt it’s entirely that.

Certain people, like Michelle (I assume) can edit ad infinitum without growing fed up with their manuscript, and good for them. That’s not going to be the case for many people. Writing is a hobby – a hobby you can turn into a career if you get exceptionally lucky, but even popular authors like Claire North and Ben Aaronovitch need to have a second job in order to make ends meet. Because of this, it’s extremely important that you enjoy the process of writing.

I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t go on about it, but focussing too much on the industry side of writing is a really efficient way of making yourself miserable. Repetition destroys passion for art. You start with a really cute idea about a magical jellyfish whose kids are stolen by a mean shark and has to lead a jellyfish uprising to topple the shark hierarchy, and you write the first draft and you love it.

You get it developmentally edited and you love making the changes, because now you’re book is even better. And then you make more changes, and then more, and then more. And at some point beyond that, you’ll start to get extremely bored with that forking jellyfish and her damned kids. You have other ideas! Other books you actually want to write! Why is the fiction industry insisting you write 100 drafts about this stupid godamn jellyfish?

One reason is a lot of people, like editors, make a lot of money from insisting people get their books edited over and over again. I’m not saying this is a conspiracy or anything, it’s just capitalism doing what it does – wringing as much joy out of art as it can in the hope of making the most money possible.

A Caveat:

I need to say this for a third time because I guarantee you some people will have ignored it the first two times: editing books is a damn-near essential part of the process. Getting someone who really knows the literary form to poke at your book and identify your problems is wonderful.

Edits should also be really enjoyable – improving your skills and improving your work is amazing. I can write to a pretty good standard now, and I love the work I put in to get me to this point. I also know I’m not done! I still have many improvements to make, but I also know I won’t make those improvements by working on the same manuscript 100 times. I know that because I tried it.

Writing is a hobby. The chances of getting picked up by an agent are extremely small (less than 1%) Your chances of getting published when picked up by an agent aren’t 100%, and your chances of being actually successful when traditionally published aren’t great either. If you’re not enjoying writing, you’re putting your happiness in the hands of a process over which you have almost no control. If you’re making yourself miserable by editing your book 100 times, then don’t.

Take it from someone who has tried doing things this way: It’s shit. It made me hate my book, It’s no guarantee of success and it doesn’t even actually make the text better. Editing generally makes a text better, editing until steam comes out of your ears doesn’t, because your boredom – your lack of enjoyment in the process will come across.

Wrap-up

Up top, I said I was feeling relaxed because I read this advice about editing until your guts fall out. That may seem strange, but the reason is because, in abandoning advice like this, I’ve gone back to enjoying writing. My current #1 rule of writing is this: Do not let the fiction industry ruin your enjoyment of your art.

When I finish my current work in progress, I’ll get it edited, because editing makes things better. I’ll probably have it edited once or twice more after that. Then, in exactly the same way Michelle told me not to, I’ll probably submit it to a few agents and a few independent publishers. Then, when it doesn’t get picked up, I’ll self-publish it, happy in the knowledge that I’m still happy with my work. I’m still proud of it. I still loved the process.

I’d rather fail to get published and enjoy writing than get published, sell 500 copies and then fade into obscurity, all whilst hating what I’d written.

Redshirts

I was re-reading John Scalzi’s Redshirts recently to check out how a successful writer tackled a problem I’ve been wrestling with. It didn’t turn out to be super useful, however I did realise something fascinating.

Before I get to the thing I noticed, I’d like to dissect an extract from the novel:

CHAPTER SIX

“Dahl, where are you going?” Duvall said. She and the others were standing in the middle of the Angeles V space station corridor, watching Dahl unexpectedly split off from the group. “Come on, we’re on shore leave,” she said. “Time to get smashed.”

“And laid,” Finn said.

“Smashed and laid,” Duvall said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with doing it in that order,” Finn said.

“See, I bet that’s why you don’t get a lot of second dates,” Duvall said.

“We’re not talking about me,” Finn reminded her. “We’re talking about Andy. Who’s ditching us.”

“He is!” Duvall said. “Andy! Don’t you want to get smashed and laid with us?”

“Oh, I do,” Dahl assured her. “But I need to make a hyperwave first.”

“You couldn’t have done that on the Intrepid?” Hanson asked.

“Not this wave, no,” Dahl said. 

So, let’s work through some of the problems with this section:

First – there’s no sense of place. We start a new chapter in a brand new location. We’ve never been to the Angeles V space station before, so we have no idea what the corridors look like. Are they clean? Are there windows that look out over a starfield? What’s the general feel of the place? Is it crowded. You’re also not supposed to start a new chapter with dialogue, because it doesn’t ease the reader into where the new chapter is set.

Second – the dialogue is all marked by ‘said’ tags, or the infinitely more clunky ‘X reminded her’ or ‘X assured her’. What conventional wisdom says a writer should do in sections like this is draw attention to who’s speaking by using character actions. These make a scene more dynamic and allow a flow of conversation to continue without having to append ‘Finn said’ and ‘Dahl said’ to the end of every godamn sentence.

Third – what is actually happening in this scene? We know the group is standing around as the scene starts, but what about when Dahl walks away? Is Dahl walking away whilst the conversation is happening? Or did he start to walk away and then stop when Duvall started talking? Are Duvall, Finn etc. standing in a tight cluster? This reads like a script.

Fourth – all the characters sound exactly the same. Quippy. Take away the dialogue tags and I’d have no idea who was talking.

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that I didn’t cherry pick a section of Redshirts which is particularly… rich in terms of editing 101 level criticisms, you could pick any scene from about 90% of the book and have exactly the same stuff to say.

So, if I had written the above section, an editor might have got me to rewrite it thusly. Changes are in bold:

CHAPTER SIX

The Angeles V space station bustled with staff, crew from docked star ships and visiting aliens who seemed eager to gum up the rich burgundy carpet with viscous slime. Dahl spotted what he’d spent the last five minutes looking for – a service corridor which would hopefully contain a comms suite.

“Dahl, where are you going?” Duvall said, matching his change of direction. “Come on, we’re on shore leave! Time to get smashed.”

Finn laughed, “and laid.”

“Smashed and laid,” Duvall said, “Not necessarily in that order.”

Finn frowned and stroked his lip. “Not that there’s anything wrong with doing it in that order.”

“See, I bet that’s why you don’t get a lot of second dates,” said Duvall, punching him in the shoulder.

Finn pantomimed clutching at his shoulder before straightening up. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about Andy. Who’s ditching us.”

“He is!” Duvall said. “Andy! Don’t you want to get smashed and laid with us?”

Dahl grinned “Oh, I do, but I need to make a hyperwave first.”

“You couldn’t have done that on the Intrepid?” Hanson asked, having to half-run to keep up with the group.

“Not this wave, no,” Dahl said.

Okay, so that’s how an editor would want me to re-write that scene. That’s something I threw together in five minutes, if I was going to actually re-write the scene I’d probably scrap it completely and find a different way to communicate the same information, but you get my point.

Now. Redshirts sold really well, and it won the Hugo Award. How do we square that with the fact that the book is, according to conventional editing wisdom, on a nuts-and-bolts level, actually pretty bad?

Could it be that new writers have to jump through all these editing hoops, trying to make their text as technically perfect as they possibly can, whilst writers like John Scalzi, who already have an established platform (first formed in 2005 when editorial standards were less strict), can ignore best practice and still attain commercial and critical success?

Could it be that, because we’re in late stage capitalism, every creative field is stuffed to bursting with people who want to make a living as a writer, artist, musician etc. and whole industries have sprung up to take their money in exchange for the advice that ‘you’ll be successful if you only learn to do X, Y and Z’?

Could it be that, whilst there are a series of best practices for writing as it exists currently, the way people read and write fiction is so varied, both historically and in the present moment, that any piece of advice that says ‘you should write like THIS’ will be inherently reductive and unhelpful?

Is life, and capitalism, too random to be able to expect technically excellent writing from every critically and commercially successful book?

Now, it’s really tempting to get all huffy and look down your nose at something like Redshirts. ‘This guy clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing’ the jealous writer says ‘I don’t know why he was so successful when my novel about diamond mining set from the point of view of a pickaxe didn’t get picked up.’

The thing is, Redshirts was successful because it was so readable. I loved Redshirts. Still do, to a certain extent. The codas at the end are highly superfluous but whatever. The point is, it’s highly readable, and part of the reason behind that is Scalzi doesn’t spend three paragraphs introducing us to the Angeles V space station corridor. Redshirts is a parody of Star Trek. The space station corridor is like a Star Trek corridor. You know what that looks like.

So, does that mean I learned the wrong lesson about my Sense of Place writing all those months ago? Maybe, in fact, I can get away with not describing a damn thing. Scalzi did and he won the Hugo!

Well, let’s all hold our horses there. Just because Scalzi got away with it, that doesn’t mean I can. Besides, description is generally a good thing. I think my overall point with this is… editors will follow strict orthodoxies when it comes to the technical aspects of writing. Scalzi has proved that you don’t need to follow a lot of those ‘rules’. Will you land an agent if you ignore those rules? Probably not, but you probably won’t land an agent anyway, because of the numbers that are stacked against you. Does that mean those strict orthodoxies that editors love are bad?

No.

And yes.

No, they’re not bad, because… hacked together and unpolished as my re-written section of Redshirts was, I think it’s pretty clearly better than the original, and doesn’t sacrifice any of the original’s readability.

Yes, because I think writers can drive themselves mad trying to follow these rules.

There’s this piece of advice that I’ve heard over and over and over again when it comes to submitting novels to agents. ‘Make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be.’ I heard that same advice from the writer who gave me a bit of a talking to, recently about what I considered ‘success’ to be. And… It’s not bad advice, exactly, but I think it’s unhelpful advice because it’s too broad.

Novels are art. There is no ‘perfect’ form for a novel to take. There is no ‘as good as it can possibly be’, and if there was, you’d never be able to tell if you’d reached it or not. The novel which I still have out for submission has been revised in a hundred ways this year. Some large, some small. Most improved the thing, but a load of changes got made and… I have no idea if they actually improved the text. At some point, I feel as if I went from improving the text to fiddling with it.

‘Well, that just goes to show that it’s ready to go!’ the unhelpful voice in my head says. But… is it? Is it as good as it could possibly be? I have no idea. Honest to goodness, I haven’t a clue.

Ultimately, that’s why focussing on getting an agent is a bad idea. An agent will pick your work up if:

1)      It’s good

2)      They click with it

You have some control over point 1 – although different people will consider very different things good, so you actually don’t have anywhere near as much control as some people might tell you, but you have almost no control over point 2 at all.

Ultimately, the world is random. Things succeed or fail, get picked up or don’t. Yes, there are things you can do to increase the chances of getting picked up – having a quality product is very important. Plus, I need to point this out every time I talk about this stuff or I come across as bitter – every book I have submitted before the current one has had serious problems with it and probably shouldn’t have been picked up. I haven’t been denied an agent because of some great, universe-spanning injustice, I haven’t got an agent so far because my work hasn’t been good enough to justify it, and I haven’t got lucky.

That first point is very important, but so is the second. I think anyone who discounts the sheer amount of luck required to make your way in any creative industry is suffering from either survivorship bias or the just world fallacy. Or possibly both.

Lessons Learned: The Wrapup

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

The Wrapup

In 2021, a 36-year-old author has been looking back on his career and considering the ups, the downs and the lessons learned. Was there a point to this? Yes, yes there was.

Genre:  Slice of Life

How good do I think this experience was, looking back on it?     10/10

Actually taking stock of the books I’ve written to this point was a really positive experience, as were a few other bits and pieces I’ll get into in a moment.

How obviously depressed was I during this period?         2/10

You don’t really do retrospectives like this if you’re feeling great about your writing, but nothing too major.

So, what now?

Of the books I’ve written, I am definitely proud of Drown the Witch, Not in My Name and Three Arachnids in a Warship. I have complicated feelings about The Suicide Machines, Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid and An Angel Named Susan. The Whispering of Black Anis was a disaster.

For a long time now, I’ve been feeling pretty bad about writing in general. This started around the time of The Whispering of Black Anis. At that time, I’d bounced off a draft of a book I’d really wanted to write but couldn’t make work (a book about care workers in post-apocalyptic Canterbury). I’d had the dispiriting experience of my first draft of Drown the Witch being unreadable due to an unlikeable protagonist, and I’d had Whispering be rejected by everyone except a vanity publisher.

After that many setbacks, it’s honestly amazing to me that I continued writing at all. I’ve checked back on some of my old diary entries and I was so dispirited. I said the same thing about myself and depression to a therapist once. I said it was amazing I was still here given how depressed I’d been, and for such a long time. The therapist said that some part of me really, really wanted to get better. I think something similar applies with my writing.

As part of this general retrospective, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about writing and creativity and whether I should actually carry on writing. One author told me that, by focussing on getting an agent, I was focussing on an extrinsic goal rather than an intrinsic one.

For a full explanation of what that means, watch Zoe Bee’s video on the matter here:

The short version is: By tying what I think of as ‘success’ to something over which I have no control – in this case, being picked up by an agent, I’m focusing not on writing an amazing book, or doing good work of any sort, but seeking approval from an external figure. I’m not writing for its own sake, I’m doing it to make senpai notice me. Studies show that those who work for the promise of a reward (getting an agent, in my case) are less happy and do less good work than those who do the work for its own sake.

I’ve been trying to get an agent for years now. I was not feeling good about writing in general before I started really focussing in on that goal, but I think that goal only made things worse. So this is me, taking a step back.

I still have submissions out with agents, and I’m in the middle of a scouting program which may or may not lead to anything, so I won’t do anything churlish like withdraw my submissions, but I don’t think I should do any more. I think I need to focus in on why I started writing in the first place. I need to focus on writing some really amazing fiction, because that’s what I want to do. I love the book that’s under submission at the moment. I really, really love it. I want it to be out there. If no-one reads it, that’s fine. I know it’s good.

In a way, I’m fortunate. I’m still so ill I can barely do anything except write and go on dog walks. I’m on a couple of NHS waiting lists which I hope will improve things, but as things stand currently, I may as well write for writing’s sake.

H*ck yeah.

Lessons Learned: Not in My Name

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

Not in My Name

In an alternate 2003, the UK holds a referendum to go to war with Iraq and splits the nation with a 52% to 48% yes vote. A young activist is beaten to death after a demonstration. The police say her murder was random.

It wasn’t. More activists will be murdered. The activists only trust each other. Maybe that trust has already been betrayed.

Witty, political, and provocative, this New Adult mystery is based on real events, and keeps the reader guessing to the very end.

Genre: New Adult Cosy Mystery

How good do I think this book is, looking back on it?      8/10

This book is good. It does what I intended it to do, and the improvements I made as a writer really started to show in this book, but it never feels as alive to me as Drown the Witch or An Angel Named Susan. Fantasy is my comfort zone.

How obviously depressed was I during the writing?        5/10

I gave the protag an anxiety disorder, for reasons I can’t quite remember. Not quite depression, but linked.

Background

In May 2018, I wasn’t feeling particularly good about writing novels. My wife said I should try entering some short story competitions. This didn’t turn out to be great advice – I’d spent years at that point honing my skills in writing novels. Switching over to other types of writing required a completely different skillset which I didn’t necessarily have. Still, of the clutch of short stories I wrote, one gained some traction. It was called Depression and the Denouement and it placed in a collection released by Claret Press in 2019.

My experience with Indie Presses up to this point had ranged from disappointment to despair. The Suicide Machines hadn’t been edited at all, and whilst Confessions had fared better, the publisher hadn’t been able to publicise it massively, due to being a small outfit.

The event Claret Press put on to launch the Insights collection, which my story placed in, impressed me no end. Hundreds of people all collected together to raise money to fight motor neuron disease. I knew this was a publisher I wanted to work with. The event had included a charity auction. I won two prizes – breakfast with the publisher and having my work edited by the Claret Press interns. These opportunities allowed me to cement a relationship with Katie, Claret Press’ owner.

I submitted The Whispering of Black Anis to them, which they turned down (a very wise decision which I’m very grateful for, now). Katie, called me and explained that she was only really looking for political novels and, tactfully, didn’t mention how bad the book was.

Political, eh?

I’d had this idea bouncing around in my head – a way to explain Brexit to those who didn’t understand our resistance to it: Imagine a referendum had been called in 2001 to decide whether the UK should go to war with Iraq. Would the fact that there had been a referendum have made it any less of a terrible decision?

I pitched this idea to Katie and she told me to write it. I’d never had a publisher ask me to write something before. It flattered my ego. She asked me to write a 50,000-word novel, nothing too long. An Angel Named Susan had been 84,000 words. Sweet, I thought, I can do 50,000 words in my sleep.

The only problem was… what I’d pitched as an idea for a setting, not a story. I didn’t want to write something set in Westminster where different political factions were wrangling over the Iraq war. That very much wasn’t my jam, but a murder mystery…

I worked out a plan with my wife, bashed out a first draft in two weeks and sent it over to a developmental editor. That’s right! May 2019 and I’d finally started getting professional editors on board at the correct stages.

The editor commented that I didn’t have enough people getting murdered. In version 1, only one person died in the book. I was a little annoyed by this as, in a 50,000-word book, it felt that having three bodies (one every 16,000 words) would be a little silly. I had a chat with Katie about this problem, and this led to the following conversation:

Me:        I don’t have room in a 50,000-word novel to have bodies dropping from the ceiling.

Katie:    Why are you only writing 50,000 words?

Me:        …because you told me to.

Katie:    What?

Me:        You told me you wanted the book to be 50,000 words long.

Katie:    Ah. Sorry, that’s my fault. When I tell writers I want something 50,000 words, that’s because I know they’ll go massively over the word count.

It turned out Katie wasn’t used to having writers actually listen to her instructions and stick to them. This same scenario re-occurred a couple of times during the production of the novel, but we got there in the end.

The Release

Katie had some interns who sent NIMN out to traditional review sites, all of which ignored it. They also sent the book out to reviewers on Instagram, which meant I have a bunch of lovely reviews from Zoomers on Instagram.

Post Release

Initial sales were promising but dropped off fast, as these things go. As prep for this I asked the publisher how sales had gone and the result was less than entheusiastic. It sounded a lot like we’d had an initial flurry of interest thanks to the zoomers and then the book had immediately sunk, as has happened for basically every book I’ve ever written.

Lessons Learned

1)      Working contacts is hugely important

This one wasn’t in any way a surprise. The phrase ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ is a truism for a reason. Not in My Name only exists because I got to know Katie. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if Claret had been a larger operation. NIMN only exists because Katie decided to call me to explain why she didn’t want to take on the book I’d submitted to her. If she’d emailed me a form rejection, I’d never have written it. Funny how life turns out, sometimes, isn’t it?

2)      Working with editors at the correct times is hugely important

Without a developmental edit, NIMN would probably have never worked. Getting the edit done after the first draft really focussed me on the Cosy Mystery genre. It meant that Katie and I could work out what we both wanted from the project. If I’d spent two years working on the 50,000-word version of NIMN only to submit it to Katie and have her go ‘where’s the rest of it?’ I’d have felt rather annoyed.

3)      It’s nice to work in different genres occasionally

A murder mystery set in the real world isn’t my usual jam. I found it much easier to write because I wasn’t constantly having to come up with strange locations and magical artefacts. This led to writing the first draft in two weeks and the second draft in ten days. I did a lot more work on the book (a lot more), but the fact that I was able to bash out a draft that quickly says a lot about how into the zone I got. Still, I don’t love NIMN. I like it, I think it’s an important book – probably the most important book I’ve written. It talks about subjects I care about deeply, from police violence to the importance of community activism. Still, I’d love it a whole lot more if it included lasers, vicious seraphim or magical creatures. I did try to put some in during a dream sequence but Katie asked me to take them out.

4) Publicity needs to be long term

I was recently watching an interview with a succesful self-published author and they talked about how they spent the entire first 100 days post-release actively publicising the thing using targeted advertising. To say nothing of the pre-release ARCs (advance review copies), blog tours and such. Without that sort of thing, books just… sink. Money is a massive factor here - without the money to spend on advertising, your book will get lost amongst everything else released. Yay, capitalism.

Lessons Learned: Three Arachnids in a Warship (to say nothing of the human)

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

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.

Lessons Learned: An Angel Named Susan

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

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.

Lessons Learned: Drown the Witch

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

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…

Lessons Learned: The Whispering of Black Anis

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

Books that never made it to print: The Whispering of Black Anis

Melody is an eighteen-year-old who slips into a deep depression, although she does not realise what is happening to her at first. She loses herself in a fantasy where everything makes more sense. This enables her to feel more in control and work towards making sense of these new feelings.

She imagines herself in a world torn apart by a cthulu-eque monster and that she is now stalked by a figure dressed in white who wants to destroy her. It gradually becomes clear to the reader that these are how Melody has interpreted her panic attacks and feelings of depression, respectively. The story focuses on Melody’s journey to recovery, assisted by her friends and hindered by parts of her own mind.

Genre: Young Adult Horror

How good do I think this book is, looking back on it?      3/10

This is the only book I’ve ever written which is unambiguously bad. There are moments of flare and technically decent writing, but any competent editor would start their letter by saying the authorial voice is overwhelming.

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

The entire book is about depression, I was essentially pouring my feelings onto the page.

Background

After Confessions, I wrote some of the sequel, then worked on the first draft of the book which would eventually become Drown the Witch. Neither of these projects particularly wowed me, so I decided to write something more personal. I also decided to switch over to Young Adult, because I thought there was more of a market opportunity there, and because my characters always felt lost and alone in a vast, unknowable world (because that’s how I feel pretty much of the time) so I may as well lean into it.

Whispering was my attempt to turn a depressive meltdown into a novel. It failed for two reasons:

First, the main thing about my experience of depression is… it isn’t dramatic. When I’m depressed, I generally don’t get up to much. I lie in bed, eat crisps, and feel miserable. There are two easy ways to make drama in a novel about depression – self harm and suicide. I didn’t want to touch either because I felt it cheapened the narrative to rely on those elements which can be emotionally manipulative and cliched.

Second, the protagonist spends almost the entire book alone. This is a realisation I’ve come to only this morning – my writing only really works when the protag has someone to bounce off. The protag of Whispering, Melody, spent the entire time in her own head and it was just a bit boring.

There were some patches of the book which stood out as less than bad. The interplay between Melody and her new friend Fletcher had its moments but generally the story was flat and didn’t really go anywhere. It was a normal, boring story I tried to spice up with cosmic horror elements which were pretty obviously all in the protag’s head.

Submission

This was the first book I submitted in earnest to agents. Having apparently learned nothing from Confessions, I didn’t hire an editor. I got feedback from my friends and family, then sent it out to around 25 agents. They all said no, other than some people who turned out to be a vanity publisher. I was desperate for it to be successful at that point, so I very nearly said yes. I am very, very glad now that my friends talked me out of going with the vanity publisher.

Lessons Learned:

1)       Hire a damned editor

If I’d got a developmental editor on board early enough, they might have been able to save this book. Personally, I think this project was doomed from the moment I decided to set it in the real world. The real world isn’t my jam. I do my best writing in weird and fantastical places. Still, an editor might have got this book to the stage where it was at least readable.

2)      Writing courses are your friend

I signed up to a writing course during the editing of this book and it was an absolute godsend. I had such a good time and learned a lot about the craft. My desire to improve really yielded fruit in my next book.

3)      The autobiographical period is painful

Many years later, I saw a talk by a famous author on YouTube. They said that every writer goes through an autobiographical stage. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s something we all have to get past. It was a relief to know that other people had gone through this phase as well. I came out the other side a better writer, although my confidence had been shaken by being rejected by so many agents.

4)      Protagonist action is crucial

Protagonist action drives the plot. With an inactive protagonist, your story will be uninteresting. In Whispering, my protagonist went to a night club and had a perfectly nice time, but nothing of consequence happened. She went urban exploring and had a perfectly nice time… but nothing of consequence happened. She spoke to mental health professionals and had dramatic revelations about her mental state… but other than that, nothing happened.

When writing, you need to include both external statkes and internal stakes. Your protagonist is fighting for her life against an alien warlord, yes, but what does this conflict mean for her inner journey? Your protagonist is torn between two life paths, yes, but what does this mean for her survival in the upcoming post-apocalyptic death race?

In Whispering, I was entirely focussed on internal stakes and completely neglected any external stakes. This makes sense for a book about depression, but just because the idea is justified thematically, that doesn’t make it a good idea.

5)      Don’t try to cheat the reader

The cosmic horror elements I included were consistent with my experience of depression, and they were used to a specific point throughout the novel - using horror to communicate to a reader how depression felt. Still, I maintained a pretence during the first half of the novel that the cosmic horror elements were actually happening, and I only revealed after the midpoint that they were manifestations of depression and anxiety.

I get why I made this choice. If it had been clear that the horror elements were manifestations of mental illness from the start then there wasn’t much tension, and there wasn’t a sense of threat. Including the mystery of ‘oooh, why are there spooky Cthulhu monsters?’ meant I got to maintain a sense of tension… except that sense of tension was a lie, and it was pretty obvious from the word go.

I’d correctly identified a problem with the text – it lacked tension and stakes, but my solution was to pretend that tension and stakes actually existed. No, seriously, they do. Look at all these Cthulhu monsters. Such tension! A more sensible idea might have been to have a threat happen because of the depression. If she can’t get a handle on her new feelings then she won’t be able to hold down her job, or she might be taken into care by the council or something. The problem with that idea is both examples I just gave are pretty bad. I think I’m really demonstrating here why I don’t write books set in the real world. Any slice of life writers out there are probably reading this, screaming about how obvious the solution is.

It’s tempting to say that, when I’d noticed the lack of stakes, I should have taken that feeling of wrongness with the novel and sat with it, really pulling apart why I felt I needed to maintain the mystery for as long as I did… but I think that’s a little unfair. When writing Whispering, I was still very early in my career and it’s phenomenally challenging to write a novel with depression as both theme and primary plot subject. I’d struggle to do it now, and I’ve had four years in which to improve my skills since I put Whispering to bed.

6) Rising action is very important

At the start of Whispiering, Melody has been depressed for a while but the inciding incident, which causes her to start imagining Cthulhu monsters, is a panic attack. She continues to feel depression and experience panic attacks throughout the novel. See the problem? Nothing escalates. Melody’s emotional state does deteriorate, but not to a particularly dramatic degree. Again, I didn’t want to have Melody attempt suicide or cut herself, but those were the obvious ways to raise the stakes.

It’s tempting to say that rising action is a convention, and one that can be broken for the right project. That’s technically true, but if you look at slice of life TV shows, what becomes obvious very quickly is, even though they lack stakes, they still have rising action, it’s just the action is tied to different sorts of plot beats than a traditional fantasy novel.

Any text needs to have a sense of progression. In Whispering, I attempted this by having Melody make progress through the mental health system, forge new relationships and abandon old ones. That’s not bad, exactly, but in terms of drama there wasn’t much for Mel to overcome. Her new relationship was only in danger if she let her feelings of depression sabotage it, which… is true to life but meant that the people she forged relationships with were pretty clearly loving and supportive… so everything, to the reader, was obviously going to be fine.

Whispering was a mess, is what I’m saying.

Lessons Learned: Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week…

Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid

Meet Milligan Clodthorpe, a gentleman arachnid of exceptional lineage who finds himself involuntarily inhabiting the body of a human female. Bainbridge, the cad who now inhabits Milligan's arachnid form, is known throughout the galaxy as thoroughly selfish and uncivilized. What he might get up to with a body such as Milligan's simply does not bear thinking about. With the help of Milligan';s mechanical valet Forsythe, his revered Uncle Angus, his psychotic cousin Gertrude, and Pigstick, his former comrade in arms, he must recover his arachnid body and prevent Bainbridge from disgracing his family name.

Through twists and turns, Milligan's pursuit leads him into thrilling adventures. Be prepared for daring espionage, scandalous scenes, and perilous levels of dry wit.

Genre: Science Fiction comedy

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

This book is the ultimate counterargument to the idea that artists should be allowed to write whatever they want. The text is opaque, barely making sense to anyone not intimately familar with humour and speech patterns from the 1940s. That said, there’s still some good stuff in there. An aristocratic giant spider engaging in a cocaine-fueled spaceship battle remains one of my highlights

How obviously depressed was I during the writing?        5/10

Milligan is very obviously depressed throughout the book, but it’s a background element rather than an acute problem.

Background

The idea of doing a P.G. Wodehouse/Sci Fi mashup had been floating around in my head for a while. I mentioned it to my wife as we were driving to a national park in Utah and she said it was the best idea I’d ever had.

I started working on the book whilst still working at the hospital. As with The Suicide Machines, I didn’t plan any of the book out and this time that came back to bite me in the behind very, very badly. The plot meanders, mcguffins are introduced and the forgot about and whilst characters do have arcs, they’re not particularly well integrated into the text.

It stars a giant spider, which was certainly… a decision I made. I listened back to my podcast I made after releasing the book, and apparently my logic was I wanted to experiment with a non-human protagonist. This will be the first in a long line of examples when my desire to experiment and try something new made my job a lot harder than it needed to be.

I posted about Confessions on some sort of writing subreddit, and the idea got some actual traction. A small publisher, Montag Press, asked to take a look at the thing, which was extremely exciting. I sent it over, and they said no, they didn’t want it. The reasons were mainly qualitative. So, I decided to get an editor but, being extremely ill, I wasn’t sure I could afford a professional, so I asked my brother to help. He has a PhD in English Literature, it made sense at the time. I worked on the book, got a cover made up and sent it back to the publisher, who said yes! We worked on it some more and put the book out.

The Release

I hired a publicist, because I didn’t want it to sink like a stone, like the last book had. Despite getting a couple of very nice reviews, it still sank like a stone. The reader reviews were mixed. Some people absolutely loved it, others bounced right the h*ck off it. It seems that if Confessions is your sort of thing, it’s really your sort of thing. To this day, it’s still one of my wife’s favourite books.

 Post Release

I started working on the sequel almost immediately after, but I stalled out pretty quickly. My health was deteriorating rapidly during the release and, whilst I was still just about able to work, I wouldn’t be for long. I was at the start of a long slide into chronic depression which wouldn’t start improving for years to come.

Lessons Learned:

1)       Don’t hire a publicist

My publicist was fine, but rather expensive. They sent the book out to multiple review joints. Two picked it up. They reviewed it well, but those reviews didn’t translate into sales. I would have been better off spending the money on social media advertising or keyword optimisation.

2)      Self-improvement is key

Not planning Confessions really came back to bite me, so in the period of petit mort after the book release, I decided I really needed to actually work on my writing and improve. The first point I wanted to focus on was readability – Confessions wasn’t just a weird book, it was extremely opaque. Milligan’s narration was extremely difficult to follow.

3)      Persistence can be rewarded

Resubmitting to Montag Press, after they’d initially turned Confessions down was a mildly bold step, and one which was rewarded handsomely.

4)      For me, first person is the way to go

I loved writing in first person. I loved the tension I could create in the reader’s head as they tried to work out whether the protag’s perceptions and reality truly matched up. Some people find first person a little limiting. I find those limits exhilarating.

Lessons Learned: The Suicide Machines

For reasons I don’t want to get into right now, I’m feeling in the mood to reflect back on my writing career: the highs, the lows and the lessons learned thus far. I’ll be talking about my books in the order they were released (or not, as the case may be), rather than the order in which I wrote them, because that can get a little messy.

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

Unexpected upsides to submitting properly

As mentioned previously, authors are supposed to submit to agents in batches, rather than send out fifty submisisons in one caffiene-fueled weekend and then call it a day. Both approaches have their upsides and downsides, but I want to focus in on one particular upside I discovered yesterday.

I’ve been doing submissions for a little while now, but I’m still heavily targeting the agents I approach. I’m only submitting to agents who I have a really good reason to approach. This slows down the process a lot, but it means that occasionally I’ll stumble across something - an article, a novel - and find a new agent who I think would be absolutely perfect for my book. Submitting to such people brings a little thrill of discovery and, yes, hope.

I could have done this in the old days when I took the shotgun approach to submissions, but the dispair at being rejected such a huge number of times in a row would have stopped me. Submitting properly, in groups, means two things.

First, it means I can properly tailor my submissions, which is good for my chances.

Second, it means I always have an eye on what the next stage of the process is. This is important for me psychologically, as it means that I’m keeping in my head that there is a next stage of the process. When I submitted using the shotgun approach, the fifty or so submissions I made were plans A, B, C and D. I had no backup plans. The mere esxistence of backup plans for me currently is keeping my hope alive. That tiny flicker of hope is proving invaluable to following up on oppertunities when they occur, rather than feeling crushed and dispirited to the point where I don’t bother seeking such oppertunities out in the first place, or submitting to them if I happen across them.

So, it turns out, the advice that you should submit in batches is good advice.

Adventures with music part 2

The reason music and how it connects to writing is on my mind is it’s submission season. I say season. Unless things go spectacularly well, this ‘season’ is going to last maybe 18 months. So it’s a season of American television. A loosely connected series of episodes with enormous gaps placed at random depending on the whims of arcane forces beyond mortal understanding.

Anyway.

This song was on my mind when I made a recent submission:

Isn’t it interesting how some art can be both empowering and extremely depressing? To balance it out, here’s a song from Tanja Daub, which is on a similar topic but has a different tone to it:

Tl;dr - it hurts to have work rejected but it’s better than not putting the work out there in the first place

Music that connects to my writing

When I moved my latest book into the line editing stage, I pulled together six songs which I considered to be direct influences on the text. Here’s that playlist:

I won’t go into the whys and hows of each track because it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense if you haven’t read the text. Still, I found the exercise both useful and interesting, so I decided to work through the novel and pick out a track which thematically embodied each important section. Here’s that playlist:

I’ve never made a soundtrack for one of my novels before. It was strangely empowering. A fun exercise. These days I listen to it whenever I edit the thing.

That’s all I’ve got for today. My health is still extremely poor. Aggravatingly so. Life continues, in some form or another.

Depictions of racism in SFF by progressives

Racism is a topic that well meaning progressives, like myself, feel they need to address in their writing. It’s on my mind currently, because I’m reading the fourth Wayfarers book by Becky Chambers:

It’s always exciting when Becky writes a new book

Now, ths book (so far) seems to be mostly about culture clash. Different species are stuck in a closed environment together and confront the various assumptions they’d made about each other. It’s okay. Becky writes really well, so it’s more compelling than it would be from another writer but…

My problem with the book is - because we, the reader, don’t hold any of the prejudices the characters do, because we’ve never met any of these creatures, most of the exchanges go like this:

Character A: Look, it’s species X! They’re all thieves/smugglers/wierd communicators

Character B: I’m surprisingly normal.

Character A: Wow! I thought species X was like this but it turns out I was wrong! How surprising to find that I share a lot in common with Species X.

I’m being unfair and reductive, but this is the problem with Becky chosing to decide to focus her book on Sci Fi racism without laying the groundwork. The majority of the time, the reader learns about a negative stereotype concerning a species at roughly the same time the negative stereotype is undercut.

Also, having the characters be ruminating on how ‘we’re different but we’re the saaaame’ means, with few exceptions, all the prejudice exists solely in the characters’ heads… which means we’re not learning about it through action. We’re learning about it through narration. Really, these sections needed to be red ringed by an editor with ‘SNT’ written next to them. (SNT is editor-speak for show don’t tell).

It’s not bad. Again, it’s Becky, I’m not sure she’s capable of writing prose that is less than technically excelent, but I’m not sure about the actual content. It’s a text about sociological differences that’s roughly as deep as that old Aunty Donna sketch:

Becky wants the book to be about characters confronting their own unconcious biases, but it’s hard for me to connect with the subject when I don’t have any of these biases myself.

To dive into this idea a little further, Youtuber WithCindy recently put out a video about the Netflix series Shadow and Bone:

She talks about a bunch of stuff in her video, but the point that stuck with me was - it’s rare for SFF writers to write about actual racism. Most of the time they hide their commentary on racism behind specism instead. ‘Goblins are so dirty!’ ‘Alien Race X is so uninteligent!’. It’s not invalid as an approach, but… maybe if you want to discuss racism in your book you should be brave and actually discuss racism. And then just… hire every sensitivity reader on the planet.

Disclaimer: This is me thinking aloud, this doesn’t apply under all circumstances and, ultimately, I’m white and so any opinions I have on the subject of racism should be at the bottom of the list of your considerations behind those of people of colour. Watch Cindy’s videos for a start, they’re good. Start here:

Struggling

Close line editing is one of the skills I’m working on at the moment. Going through a manuscript making sure all the verbs are working hard, you’re not overly relying on certain phrases, the sentence length is nice and varied… it’s a lot of work. I tend to get into zones with line editing. Today, for example, I managed about an hour of really good work and then I just… lost it. I’ve been struggling since. Not a good day.

Why don’t love triangles work?

I just finished reading Shatter the Sky – by far the most vibrant and interesting YA fantasy book I’ve read for years. It had the start of a love triangle, and that particular element was tedious but as it was the only real flaw with the text, I still had a great time. I then read the sequel, and the love triangle managed to drag the entire story down to a watery grave. So, my question is, why don’t love triangles work in fiction?

This post is going to be essentially me thinking aloud, because I’m still extremely ill. It’s not going to be a structured argument, more a series of thoughts, but I’ll try and keep it flowing well.

So, some caveats: Not all love triangles are bad. The triangle in The Witcher 3, for example, works. It’s very possible that the triangle between Katniss and Peta in The Hunger Games also works, but I haven’t read those books for a while. I might have soured on that element since I last read them.

Also, saying ‘love triangles don’t work’ is an inherently reductive and inaccurate statement. It’s a literary device and, as such, isn’t good or bad by itself. When I say ‘love triangles don’t work’, I’m saying ‘when I discover a book I’m reading has a love triangle in it, I know I’m about to spend 200 pages wishing for this blasted love triangle to wrap up so that we can get back to the interesting stuff’. ‘Love triangles don’t work’ is merely a snappier way of saying that.

Positive aspects of a love triangle:

1)      Wish fulfilment

This seems like I’m being snarky, but wish fulfilment isn’t a bad thing. Just as people want to read about people engaging in gunfights or solving murders, so they can experience some of that same excitement, love triangles can provide some of that same thrill.

2)      They provide a natural character arc

In The Witcher 3, the two romantic Options, Triss and Yennifer, symbolise different aspects of Geralt – his hope for the future and his grounding in the past. Whichever option you go for in that game says something about the version of Geralt you’re playing. The triangle in The Hunger Games also functions like this.

3)      Being torn between two possible futures is authentically teenage

There’s a reason love triangles show up infamously often in YA fiction. Not because teenagers spend all their time caught between romantic prospects, but because the symbolism of What Path Should I Choose is core to the teenage experience.

4)      It’s a natural source of drama

“Oh no, I have feelings for two different people, and the mainstream publishing industry won’t let me be polyamorous! What am I to do?” – Every protagonist in every YA love triangle

It may not be Shakespeare but it’s a source of conflict, and conflict leads to drama. Also, Shakespeare is overrated. Give me a new book by Rebecca Kim Wells or Anne Leckie any day of the week.

Problems with love triangles:

1)      Inaction & statis

For a love triangle to last for more than a few chapters, the protagonist must be incapable of or unwilling to make a decision. As such, love triangles usually result in the main character pontificating in their head about which of her two options they’d most like to hold hands with. They have history with Suitor A, but Suitor B really gets them…

As such, a love triangle takes place almost entirely in the protagonist’s head, and any step forward is mirrored with an equal step back, until the final chapters when the triangle is finally resolved. It’s never a good thing when a reader wants to grab a protagonist by the lapels and scream ‘MAKE A FORKING DECISION’

2)       They don’t always provide a natural character arc

If the author hasn’t given a great deal of thought to what each possible romantic partner represents, then a love triangle inevitably devolves into a protagonist picking from two equally good options. In Throne of Glass, for example, the hunky captain of the guard and the hunky prince were both… fine. One was a playboy, and one was stoic but that’s not a thematic difference, it’s just there to appeal to two sorts of readers – those who like bad boys and those who like sad boys. Picking either one doesn’t tell us anything about the protagonist, other than she likes bad boys/sad boys.

3)      Resolving the triangle rarely leads to interesting development for the protagonist

This is a side effect of love triangles usually resolving at the end of the story. The protagonists picks Suitor B and they ride off into the sunset to be happy forever. In this instance, the act of making the choice is the consequence. This means that the protagonist spends 70,000 words failing to make a decision, and in the final 5,000 words, they make the decision… and then the story ends, because making the decision was the point of the love triangle.

A good protagonist will make many, many decisions across the course of a book. These decisions cascade out in a pattern: The protagonist choses option A, so consequence B happens. Consequence B makes the protagonist take new course of action C, which leads to consequence D. Love triangles don’t function like this. For the entire novel (or, more often, series of novels), the protagonist is trying to choose between options 1 and 2. What changes when they make the decision? They’re with their new romantic partner, yes. What else? They may or may not have blown up their relationship with the other character, but what actually happens as a result?

In The Hunger Games, when Katniss choses Peta, they help each other work through their PTSD. This results in a surprisingly sweet and satisfying conclusion to the series. When a character choses to take the coast road rather than the mountain path, there are all sorts of coastal-themed results to that decision. Peta in The Hunger Games was a kind character. He and Katniss would have helped each other with their PTSD whatever happened.

I think what I’m demonstrating with this point is I don’t read romance novels, because I’m reacting to romantic partners getting together by saying ‘Okay, so what?’

4)      The writer needs to be really, really sure that they’ve made both romantic options equally compelling for the reader, or they’re in trouble

The love triangle in the sequel to Shatter the Sky might not have doomed it, if that book’s Suitor A hadn’t been a terrible person. In Storm the Earth, Suitor A commits (in my opinion) unforgiveable acts (including murder), spends their time betraying their friends and making friends with obviously horrible characters. To balance this out, Suitor B also had flaws – specifically, the flaw of doing some of the same stuff the protagonist was doing (being uncommunicative, making decisions without consulting each other). I hope I don’t have to make it obvious that those flaws between Suitor A and Suitor B aren’t equivalent. In some ways Suitor A was an antagonist of the story, which isn’t a good thing when an extremely large number of pages are dedicated to the protagonist wondering if they’re the right partner for them.

Put simply, if the audience doesn’t care about one of the suitors, they’re not going to care about the love triangle. A counter to this was demonstrated by The Hunger Games (why don’t you marry The Hunger Games if you love it so much, Mike?). In that book, Peta and Gale are the suitors… but Gale barely appears in the story. He’s definitely there, but his presence is felt more in how Katniss thinks about him than by anything the character actually does. As such, it doesn’t really matter that Gale is a little underdeveloped, and less compelling than Peta, because the love triangle is an obstacle to Katniss recognising her feelings for Peta, rather than a binary choice between two suitors.

Conclusion

Honestly, the point that love triangles require the protagonist to be inactive is the best reason to not include one in a story. Protagonist action drives story. Having your protag be torn between two options, unable to move forward can be compelling under the right circumstances, but only if the writer is going to really dig into that idea, thematically.

Never Allowed to Write Again

Abi Thorn bought up a really interesting metric on an interesting interview with Owen Jones recently:

To paraphrase: If someone told you that you could never do X again, how would you feel?

So, if you loved waterskiing, and someone told you that you could never do it again, you’d be sad, right? How about your job? Or how about if someone told you that you could never see X person again?

Abi used this as a metric for what parts of her life she wanted to stick with - she dropped Stand-Up Comedy because it would have felt like a relief to never do that again, but she stuck with acting because it would be devestating to let that drop.

I think this is a really interesting idea, and one I completely bounce off.

If someone told me I could never engage in creative writing again, I’d be upset, but mainly because I’ve spent so many years improving my skills in that area. It would be sad to have spent all those years for… not my prefered amount of success.

The thing is, if I wasn’t allowed to write, I’d survive. I know this because for the past decade, and more, I’ve survived. There were many points over the last decade where I might have died, for various reasons. I had to adapt and change to survive.

I think years and years of therapy, self-reflection and self-transformation have left me with quite a fluid approach to life. That’s the positive way of looking at things. The less positive way is to say that I’ve grown used to life hitting me with a hammer. It would be arbitary and cruel for someone to tell me that I couldn’t write any more, but life is arbitary and cruel so it would make sense. And, yes, there would be some relief if I was prevented from writing. I woudn’t be spending years and years working on projects only for them to get form rejections. It would still be a bad thing because…

I love playing the drums, but I’m too ill to take lessons.

I love painting, but I don’t love it enough to slow down and get to the next level, where I spend hours and hours working on one model.

I love acting, but I’d need to spend years working on the skills required to get into another character’s head.

I love travel, sport, music, filmmaking, editing, photography… it might be easier to list the creative fields that I don’t really enjoy. But, the reason I’ve stuck with writing for so long is…

With writing, I have spent years working on plotting and pacing, character growth and arcs, the hows, wheres and whys of environmental description. I’ve learned what sort of book I’m really good at writing. Where my writing really shines. It’s not that I couldn’t do this in another creative field, but I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that writing has been the one I’ve really stuck with and worked at, when I’ve tried out so many in my time.

So I wouldn’t be devestated if someone told me I couldn’t write creatively ever again, but it would be a shame, because I’m not sure I’d ever be as good at anything else as I currently am at writing.