What The Hell Have I Been Doing This Past Year!?

So, its been a while since I posted. Originally my intent was to post on this blog every week without fail, sacrificing the first hour or so (more often so) of my writing day to penning a blog post. For a while I managed to keep that up, but a little while back I let things slip.

Originally it came about because I had to give up a day of writing, (the reasons for which have now escaped me.) The following week, in order to make up on lost time, I decided to forgo the blog post to focus on editing. The week after, I made the same decision. Things sort of cascaded from there.

2021 has been an odd year for me. Normally, by this stage in the year, I’d have either finished writing a new book, or at the very least, I’d be entering the final act. So far this year, I have yet to even scribble down the first sentence of a new book, and the way things are going, I reckon that won’t happen until 2022 at the earliest.

2021 therefore is something of a sacrificial year, as it were. Coming off the back of 2020, where I penned the book that might eventually prove my magnum opus, Conflux, the fact that I haven’t yet had the time to begin working on my next project is something of a bitter pill to swallow.

So, what, I hear you ask, have I been doing for the last nine months!? I finished Conflux in the days between Christmas and New Year’s, and if memory serves me correct, I completed the first proofread (the one I carry out before I give it to anyone to take a look at, more to make sure the plot makes sense and that there aren’t any glaring continuity issues rather than anything else,) just before I was due back at work in the first few days of January. With no pending script commitments for the drama club, that would have put me on track to start writing the sequel to Beyond the Brink (the fourth entry in the Cambrian Chronicles series) at the very start of the year.

To put things in perspective, I  didn't get to work on Conflux until April, and I think the same can more or less be said with Shadow of the Golden Dawn and Beyond the Brink. However, since 2018 I’ve begun self-publishing the works I’ve been sat on for a few years without any luck on the literary agent front.

Rise of the Apostate came out in 2016, and much to my disappointment, it wasn’t an overnight success. To date, I am still ‘trying to make it’ as it were, looking for that multi-million pound book deal with all the film rights tied in. Sales were... poor. But, having got an entire series stuck in my head, and somewhat unimpressed with the publisher that took on Rise of the Apostate, I figured I’d give self-publishing a go for the sequel, Dawn of Tyranny. 2020, I got Dawn of Tyranny up to scratch, edited it, proofread it, did the cover art, and took it to print. A surprising amount of work is involved in that whole process, given that the hard part (writing the book in the first place) is already done and dusted.

The thing is, the first draft of any manuscript is always as rough as a badgers arse. So instead of simply putting a comma in here and there, and maybe correcting the odd typo, it turns out that editing a book is actually something of an epic! It takes almost as long as writing the book in the first place! Hence me not starting Conflux until April, despite the fact that I actually had  a few weeks of furlough in March to help me get ahead.

Anyway, in May, Dawn of Tyranny launches—roaring success, million copies sold day one (pfft, I wish!) And literally, within a week or so of it going on sale, Double Dragon Publishing (the publisher for Rise of the Apostate) goes bust. Now, blessing in disguise really. I wasn’t happy with the state of Rise of the Apostate, and as such, all of the rights immediately returned to me. However... now I found myself in a predicament. I had a sequel out on sale, with the book’s predecessor no longer available to buy anywhere except out of the boot of my car. You might think the answer to this quandary was a simple one, and in essence it was. I’d just completed the whole rigmarole of getting Dawn of Tyranny ready for print, I just needed to repeat the process for Rise of the Apostate. Yes, only... no.

Rise of the Apostate needed some serious work. I was nineteen when I penned the first draft, and a fair amount of that legacy manuscript made it to the final version, only tweaked rather than entirely rewritten. Turns out I sucked at writing back then—I mean, I was alright, probably good by most people’s standards, but a decade and five other novels on, when I look back at my writing from then, I cringe internally. When writing Rise of the Apostate, I was for whatever reason trying to emulate a style that I thought high fantasy should be written in, rather than writing in my own style; truth be told, I had yet to develop my own style, something that has only really solidified in the last few years. Not only that, but I’m just objectively a better writer than I was back then. Rise of the Apostate needed work—lots of work!

Now, if you’ll recall, I mentioned earlier that I started writing Conflux in April, and it wasn’t until May that I was faced with this dilemma. With six weeks of furlough under my belt and now back at work, I was a fair way into Conflux, and if there is one thing I despise doing, it is stepping away from one creative piece of work to turn my attention on another. When I start writing a book, I finish it. Sure, I take the occasional week here and there to do some submissions and the like, but if I took a few months out halfway through a first draft, it would just kill my creative flow. I was in Conflux, and was in it for the long haul (much longer as it turned out than I had originally thought.)

Conflux clocked in at the end of its first draft at 191,000 words. For some perspective, Rise of the Apostate is about 115,000. A standard novel is about 80,000. The longest Harry Potter book, the Order of the Phoenix, is about 257,000. Conflux is no War and Peace, but its probably a good 700-800 pages long. Hence me not finishing it until December. Rise of the Apostate had to wait a fair while.

This year comes along, and finally I can get to work on what essentially became an almost full rewrite of Rise of the Apostate. Finally, I managed to get it to print, just in time for my May deadline, and it goes on sale with some brand new cover art, in second edition, alongside Dawn of Tyranny on Amazon. Only now, I have to get the sequel ready, Beyond the Brink. Whilst the third entry to my fantasy series was by no means as rough as Rise of the Apostate, it clocks in at a respectable 163,000 words, one and a half times the length. It’s taken me since May to get it ready for publishing, editing, proofreading, cover art and all, and whilst I still need to finalise some of the details on Kindle Direct Publishing, it is more or less ready to go.

So, you’d think in a few weeks I’d be ready for my next project, only, now I have Flight Through Infinity to contend with. It’s been sat on my hard drive for a good number of years now without any of the seventy odd literary agents I’ve submitted it to showing any real interest. So, I figured it is time it saw the light of day. Now, I start the whole process again, for the third time this year. Oh, and side note: I hate editing! It is a necessary evil, but compared to the initial writing process, it is incredibly dull!

So that is that. Two books down, one to go. Hopefully I’ll fly through Flight Through Infinity (see what I did there?) and I’ll be back to good old writing before the year is out, but we’ll see.

Now all I need is for some of this effort to start translating into book sales! (Hint, hint! Scroll to the bottom of this web page and there is a lovely button that will take you through to Amazon!)