04/06/2020 - Three Arachnids in a Warship Has Been Released, and Why That Doesn’t Make Me Happy

I have a new book out, which is always a strange experience for me. Many, many years ago I went to the doctor. I told him I’d been feeling depressed for a long time, but I really struggled to articulate what that actually meant. I had to see several doctors because I got them to take me seriously. What finally broke through was when I explained that my first book (then called The Unexpected Death of a Soldier) had been published by an independent press, and… I didn’t feel anything. No excitement, no pressure, no expectations… just nothing. I knew intellectually that it was a good thing to get a book published. It was an achievement. Emotionally, I had no reaction.

This is still the case. Today isn’t the day a book I’m really proud of was released into the wild. It’s just Thursday.

Still, I don’t want to go on about depression, because it risks dragging the rest of you down with me. Instead, I want to tell you a little story about writing Three Arachnids in a Warship:

I love P.G. Wodehouse’s writing. This is crucial to separate from P.G. Wodehouse the man, who collaborated with the Nazis. It’s a little more complicated than it sounds, but ‘Nazi collaborator’ is a difficult label to shake. Anyway, despite loving these celebrated comic novels from the early 20th Century, I’d never read Three Men in a Boat, which was in many ways a precursor to Wodehouse’s writing.

This changed when I read the novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, which involved time travel, a mysterious artefact and has a large section inspired by Three Men in a Boat. My wife Jen read the book after me, and asked why I’d never read Jerome K. Jerome’s book. I said I didn’t know, so I read the book and loved it. When I finished it, I knew where my inspiration to my Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid sequel would come from.

I wrote a lot of Three Arachnids in a Warship in the bath. Not the typing, I did that on a computer, boring old traditionalist that I am. I came up with a lot of the plot of the book in the bath. This was because I’d moved into a new flat and the shower broke. It was winter and we didn’t have central heating, so the flat was perpetually cold. There were only a few ways to warm up and one of them was to take long, hot baths.

So I found myself regularly lowering myself into hot water and drifting off into free association. Thankfully, Three Arachnids is the sort of novel that benefits from this loosely structured approach. I’d never be so lax as to start a project without fully planning it out these days, and these days I have dog walks for free association purposes. My publisher Charlie, when editing Three Arachnids did, however, say (I’m paraphrasing) ‘yes, Michael, this is very good, but could you maybe give us some closure on these plot threads you’ve left dangling?’

This is why writers need editors.