writing order
I’m in a common writer’s conundrum right now. My work in progress is taking a lot longer to write than I’d planned and now there’s the question: do I stick with it as my sole focus until it’s finished, or do I work on some of the other stories I’m eager to write?
The scope of this novel is larger and much more complex than anything else I’ve written. Every book is different, but I thought it might be helpful to put down my thoughts on what the obstacles were on writing the previous books in the hopes it might help me and, Calliope willing, other people overcome the same sort of challenges.
Looking back now, my first book, The Whisperer in Dissonance, seems fairly straight forward. I knew the story pretty thoroughly before putting it to paper. There aren’t a lot of characters: one point of view character, an old friend from her school, and a few others mostly people she interacts with online. The point of the book was about feeling removed from people and communicating in the small bits and deceptions that come about through social media and every day interaction. But even that book had it’s difficulties. For one thing I’d originally written it as a novella. Fortunately editor extraordinaire Kate Jonez both liked the story and also recognized that all the side characters in the early draft were very two dimensional. At her suggestion I rewrote an expanded story where the supporting characters were more lifelike. I also learned an important lesson: I’m someone who does a lot of drafts and what I think is the final draft may well not be, therefore it’s important that every change made in the story is reflected in the outline. For if the outline is not updated, it’s pretty difficult to come back to the story and see what the intention was.
My second book, End Times at Ridgemont High, also seems straightforward in hindsight. But it went through multiple iterations as well, even before it was a book. My first plan for that story was to run a Call of Cthulhu RPG campaign in a high school, sort of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but where none of the characters have superpowers and the monsters are more the creatures beyond the Hellmouth, their cultists, and no vampires. When the title “End Times at Ridgemont High” first hit me, I though of writing the story as a novella and packaging it with a bunch of other horror parodies of teen comedies, “Better Off Undead” etc. It was only rewatching Fast Times that made me realize that much as in the early seasons of Buffy the school calendar year makes for an excellent framework for telling a story. There’s a clear start and finish, there are the holidays and dances and expected events there to be twisted.
After my second book, I wrote early drafts of what would eventually become my fourth novel, Union Station. End Times had been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, and I felt at the time the next thing to do was to write a very marketable book. The problem is, and I didn’t realize it until I was attempting to sell the third draft of it to a publisher, that version of the book lacked much of the interesting ideas that would make it enjoyable to read. What was worse is that I didn’t know at the time how to overcome this obstacle, I felt uninspired to work on it, and so I put it aside and moved onto the book that I was inspired to write, the book that would become my third novel.
The work for Four Corners started while I was on a road trip visiting all the national parks in the four corners region of the southwest. Before I could write the book though, I had to overcome the obstacle that I didn’t know enough about the background material, and so I did an insane amount of research. I learned enough geography that I’m pretty certain I could teach a community college level class on the subject. My research on the ancient Puebloans was probably short of what it should have been, although I went all in on research into Puebloan mythology, checking out many books via interlibrary loans. Additional research for Four Corners spanned the history of the southwest: the Wild Bunch, the Pueblo Revolt, Mormon off shoots, Uranium Mining, and many other topics I’ve since forgotten. Once I had an understanding of each of these topics, it was relatively easy to put them together into the book.
I was watching Star Wars and I had an idea that since Star Wars is basically a fantasy in a space like setting, I would like to write a science fiction novel set in a fantasy like setting. In this setting all the magic turned out to have mundane explanations. Of the Heretic it was said that he controlled powerful magics and used them against the kingdom. When the protagonist met the heretic she was shocked to learn that the heretic was a woman and that she was not magic, but was instead using empiricism to discover things. On paper I think it sounds like a fine idea and it was fun to write. So what’s the problem? I wrote the novel in 2018/2019. In November of 2019 my friend David Burkhart read it over for me, and said, “Ordinarily my one complaint would be that this one character is too on the nose, but who am I kidding, he acts exactly the way a Trump supporter would if god forbid a plague should happen while Trump is in office.” I made fixes and submitted the novel in January of 2020, by March I knew the book was doomed. If I’d written and completed it a year earlier, it might have seemed remarkably prescient, but with the pandemic and then the insane response to pretend it didn’t exist, anyone reading the book after that would assume I was just metaphoring up what had just occurred.
I wasn’t sure what to work on next, but that was also such a depressing period between the pandemic and politics, that I felt like what I needed was a ridiculous escape, and if I needed an escape, others probably did as well. And so I wrote a bunch of stories set in my D&D campaign world and collected them up in A Cookbook for the Besieged (and other tales). This was a lot of fun to do, and the following year I did a follow up book Ten For The Ages. When I read Tolkien (as well as other fantasy) I always wondered what happened in the other ages? Often fantasy writers offer hints as to what happened in the previous ages, and Tolkien being the master of the Appendice had some elements of what came after the third age as well, but they never really seem to expand that into a more modern era. And so I told ten stories each with a different subgenre corresponding to the era, so in addition to high and low fantasy there is a hardboiled detective story, a regency-ish romance, a Philip K Dick inspired scifi tale, cyberpunk, and eventually far future space opera. In some ways these two books were easier to write because I knew all along that they’d be self published and we’re just what I wanted to write at the time. The obstacle that I still had to overcome is that it’s still a lot of work to write a book. Creating anything takes a certain amount of will. Hell, I almost ran out of the necessary will to make dinner last night half way through cooking it. It takes an extra amount of determination to will a book into existence, more so when you suspect that the audience for said book might not be there, especially with an idea as insane as “short stories set in my D&D campaign world.”
And so we come back to Union Station, my fourth and most recent novel. In the fall of 2020 my stepmother died, and I was tasked with cleaning out her house. This was a nightmare and there are probably a host of horror stories waiting to be told from that experience, but one of the good results from the situation is that I at last knew how to overcome the obstacle I had and how to spice up Union Station. My stepmother had been a book binder, and while cleaning out the “bindery” I realized I could use all of that knowledge there to fit in with a storyline that was already a bit of a love letter to all things book.
And so that takes me back to my question. Do I stop what I’m doing and write one of my planned sequels to Union Station? Do I write the vampire novel I’d thought up? Do I write the weird science story that Stranger Things has really inspired me to get back to? Somehow I think I need to press on and finish this beast of a book first, but it’s becoming clear to me that I need to pick up the pace, because the temptation of those other projects is growing by the day a lot faster than my word count.
