Lessons Learned: The Suicide Machines

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

Genre: Science Fiction

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

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

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Release

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

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

Post Release

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

Lessons learned:

1)      Novels are 70,000+ words long.

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

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

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

 3)      Writing can get you through some extremely dark times

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

Lessons Learned: 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.

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: 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…

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: 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: 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: 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.