Wierd Headspace
At the moment, I am doing three things:
I am doing publicity for Not in My Name (due out March 20th)
I am in discussions with my mentor and her boss as to whether my next book is ready to be sent out to agents
I am doing pre-production for the book I plan to write next
Each of these comes with its own unique upsides and downsides, so lets run through them:
Publicity:
Upsides:
It’s the culmination of a project which has been in motion since April 2019. I finally get to put a book out into the world which I worked really hard on.
The publisher have been really good at working with me, so it feels like I have an actual partner in this enterprise. This makes the process feel less overwhelming and more like this book might actually go somewhere.
I get to show off the publicity images I had comissioned ages ago for this book, which I love:
Downsides:
Actually getting anyone to look at a book that’s not from a major publisher and/or doesn’t have a big name attached is highly frustrating. Hundreds of novels are published every single day and it’s impossible for reviewers to look at them all. Reviewers feel like they’re drowning in things to look at whilst people like me feel like we’re a firefly trying to get noticed at a fireworks display.
Publicicity is something I take part in, because I’m a professional and it needs doing, but it’s not something I love. I love writing. I don’t love begging people to look at my work.
Publicity is expensive. You pay for advertising, you pay to have your book put on blog tours. If you have money to burn, you pay for a publicisit. None of this garauntees any level of success. It’s capitalism at its worst - a whole industry of people who exist to take money from people who don’t have very much in the hope that they’ll be able to break through the noise. The noise in this case, is a whole load of other people doing much the same thing as you.
Prep for sending the next book out
Upsides:
I love this next book and I have the tiniest amount of hope that it might actually get picked up by an agent. I think it really is that good.
Downsides:
It won’t get picked up by an agent, so that hope is due to be dashed soon
The book is currently being checked over by my mentor’s boss and she’s definitely going to ask for some changes. I don’t particularly want to make any changes as I’m outside of the head space I was in when I wrote that book, having had my depression cured a few months ago. I’ll still make the required changes, of course, because I’m a professional, but… one of the things about this industry is… no-one ever looks at a book and says ‘yeah, it’s good’. They always have things that need fixing.
Paul Valéry once wrote “un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé . . . mais abandonné” which we can roughly translate to ‘a work is never completed… only abandoned;”. You can endlessly tinker with something and it will never be perfect, so having to make endless changes feels like treading water in a bit.
That being said, if I do land an agent (which I won’t), she’ll ask for changes, and if that agent lands me a publisher, that publisher will ask for changes, so I’m trying to make peace with this… impatience. This frustration with tinkering with a project I consider wrapped.
I need to make peace with this part of the process, partly because it’s inevitable and partly because the book isn’t perfect. If someone asks me to change something, I can probably come up with something even better than what was there in the first place.
Pre-Production
Upsides:
The raw creative aspect of pre-production is very thrilling. I’m thinking about characters, character journeys, plot beats and themes. I’m pulling together image boards and watching videos about literary ideas. I’m getting really excited about telling this story with these characters in this world.
Downsides:
The freeform nature of pre-production is scary. I’ve pulled together a bare bones plot summary comprising of twelve major plot beats I want to hit along the way. It feels very flimsy and characterless to me. This is because I’m just coming off a very fleshed out, very in depth project where I’m really proud of the story.
I went back and re-read my notes from my last project, from when I was at around the same stage to comfort myself that pre-production is always like this. That’s how I write stories - I start with a bunch of bullet points and expand, and expand and expand over the course of years until I have this story I’m really proud of.
The time isn’t what’s scaring me. The fear comes from the question - what if this story is less good than the last one? What if I’ll never recapture that magic?
Those questions are perfectly natural. The only problem is I won’t know if I was right to be worried for months now, when I’ll have tens of thousands of words written and the story will be truly taking shape into something special, or maybe something bland and disappointing. Only time, and a lot of work, will tell.
Still, at least it’s work I enjoy.
In summary
I hope you can appreciate that I’m feeling a lot of very odd things, as I try to balance these three aspects of the writing journey. I’ve got three different types of hope, three different types of frustration and three different types of weariness. This has all left me in a very wierd headspace.
Oh hey, that was the title of this entry. That’s neat.