Hunting Demons: A long takeoff

About three months into writing Chasing Innocence, way back in 2008, I stopped and did a calculation based on total word count and time so far invested. I worked out it would take me seven years to finish the book.

It turns out the hardest part of writing that book was the beginning, for all sorts of reasons, mostly as I got to know the characters and importantly, getting their voices sounding natural in my head. Once I hit the 20k mark the wheels left the ground and we were off. Five months of writing later the first draft was finished.

So a lot of writing, lessons learned and many adventures later, we find ourselves in 2013. Chasing Innocence has been published for over a year, I've written a lot of words during this time, with one novella: Mahrie now also published. I'm currently writing the sequel to Chasing Innocence, titled: Hunting Demons. With two books published, some award short listings under my belt and a lot of great Amazon reviews, I feel I'm on the right track. The sequel would be a breeze!

The thing is, progress has been slow. The slowness is not because I don't know what's going to happen through the core of the story, or because I don't know these characters. I recently did a calculation and guess what? The average daily word count meant it would take seven years to finish the first draft. And now I think about it, didn't I really struggle at the beginning of Mahrie too?

So the lessons I take from this as I approach 20k of words, is that I'm just a slow starter when it comes to getting a story underway. Daily word counts are not helpful in my planning, but sitting at the desk and steadily chipping away at the story is. Despite knowing the characters very well, it has been about finding their voices, hearing their thoughts in the moment to moment. It's getting there. The wheels feel like they might soon leave the ground.

Emotional Colour

Finish it.

I did write a book of fiction. It is out there and it has been read by so many people. 'What about the next one?' Many ask. 'When can we read it?'

Isn't that a wonderful question to have as a writer!

Writing book one took all of me, at least everything I was to the point I finished it, which was 2010. I came up with the idea for book two about a year before that, in 2009. My time from 2010 to 2012 was largely spent getting book one polished and published. All the while book two brewed and bubbled in my mind, busily evolving the bones of a story from the stew of imagination. In 2012 I started writing it. It is there, the bones, but in writing this second book I have learned a lot, not just of what it takes to craft the lives and dramas of whole new characters, but in the kind of writer I am.

From the moment I started writing properly in 2002, it has been a release valve. Reflected in the words are all my frustrations, hopes, dreads, loves and murderous rages. Most of all writing is a means for my emotions to be gently let out. Emotion for me, I have learned, is everything. I'm telling you now like I've always known this, the reality is it took a hard year of struggling. It has been a year of plotting and progressing slowly, driven now by the need for a second book to create a broader commercial canvas. Some of the writing has glowed but so much has been dry - words and actions strung around momentum in the name of a story.

Finishing book one really had taken all of me. Everything had been expelled in creating Sarah Sawacki's story, the emotions of my imagination given colour by the books, images, video and music, were all now part of that book. Very little remained inside of me.

Fortunately this is a restless mind. I have realised the struggling isn't so much that I haven't got another book in me, it's that I'm busy creating a whole load of new imagination to pour into book two. The research has been as much discovering the content and colour of the emotions as it has the technical detail. This is after-all a learning process, I'm coming to understand it always will be.

Book two is about a man who makes a living protecting people, coming to terms with the murder of his wife. It is about him discovering why. It is now busily being animated, the dry words given emotional colour. It is being written because I care for the story, it is being crafted for a commercial audience to share and enjoy, not just so I can expand my canvass of work. Book three will be the next stage in Sarah Sawacki's story. I'm very keen to find out how much of what went into her first story will be there for me again. We will see.

I Write (Finding time)

The second in a series discussing the method behind the madness. 

Walking across
 Hyde Park in March 2012

My weekday writing day is split into two halves. The first twelve hours span the moment I leave home at 07:30, to the moment I return at about 19:30. The morning commute into London takes one hour. The train I catch is an inter-city and usually has a buffet bar. I write with the netbook on the bar for the hour. This used to be a great time to write but more frequently now it isn't because more people know what I'm up-to. If the train isn't delayed into Paddington I'll walk the 2k into the office through Hyde Park. I'll be listening to Moby. His music plucks at my emotions, which transfers to the characters as I listen to them debate and react to different ideas and scenarios for the story. I call this process writing in my head. The point in this process I hear the character's voices, is the point I know I'm into the story.

I try not to write at lunchtime but if I'm hard into something then I probably will, or if I'm coming to the end of the book I will too. I do like to run lunchtimes around Hyde Park, which is an incredibly liberating process for this creative mind.

Of course I can often find myself frustrated at not being able to write during the day but will have moments that throw me into a scene or idea. Sometimes I'll be found stood in a corridor or waiting on a meeting, staring blankly into my imagination and writing in my head. Answering enquiring questions from colleagues with a 'just thinking through a problem.' Which may sound convincing as I'm paid to solve technical problems. As many colleagues have read the first book I suspect it isn't convincing any more.

Not waiting to get off
Waiting to leave Paddington.

On a good day I'll leave work at 17:30 and walk back to Paddington listening to Moby and writing in my head. As the trains out of Paddington are crowded to the point battery chickens travel in more comfort, I usually find myself a corner with a little shoulder space and read my Kindle. I love this reading time although I hate being a battery chicken for this hour.

If all goes well I'll be home for 19:30, listening to the Prid's (Mrs Potter) travails of the day while playing with the cat and cooking my dinner. By 21:00 the Prid will be winding down and the cat will be alternating between the two of us. By this time we're over fifteen hours into the day. I'm mentally exhausted and creativity seems like the last thing I want to do. My mind will do it's best to convince me anything but writing is the best course of action. The book isn't going to write itself though. So that there are minimal barriers to me sitting down and writing, my PC in the study is set-up so I can get a chapter on-screen in less than a minute.  I'll start editing the chapter I'm currently writing and before I know it I'm drawn into this wonderful world and away we go. I've never been much of a sleeper, not consistently. If I have the wind in my sails I might write through to one, if there's a gale blowing in my mind I've been known to write through three. If I was a full time writer I know I'd write through the night, like I did when I was a full-time programmer. Usually I stop sometime about midnight. The cat is often my companion, usually on my lap or on the desk, sometimes on the keyboard if she's not had enough attention. If the creative spark goes out or there's nothing in the tank I'll not force the issue, I'll turn my attention to a blog.

The worlds worst writing assistant.

I'm often asked: 'Where do you find the time to blog?' The reality is any post I write is the cumulative effort of thirty minutes, or an hour here and there. Sometimes over days or weeks. I'll have multiple posts on the go so when I drop out of creative, whatever's on my mind is what I work on. Blogging is important to me because not a lot of people are into what I'm into. Not at least people I spend any time with in any given day. Blogging allows me to chat away as if everyone is listening. Switching to blog mode is not difficult, it's not creative. I can be almost asleep and still be typing a blog. I collect my thoughts and express them in the fewest words possible. As such blogging is therapy.

Depending on what time I get to bed and the stage I'm in the book, the next morning's start will vary from five or six AM. If it's early in the book I'll wake up at six and lay in bed and daydream key markers in the story. If I'm on the long slope to the end I'll get up at five and write for two hours. This is usually editing and expanding what I wrote the day before. At seven all is synced and my focus becomes leaving for work at 7:30.

This is where it's mostly at

Occasionally nothing works like this at all. A good book will sometimes grab me like American Gods and The Hunger Games did recently. Sometimes I know where I need to get to in the story but can't think how. Or I've dreamed up a brilliant way to turn everything inside out and upside down, but for the life of me can't conjure a way to make it work. These moments are daunting because they're time consuming as I figure it all out, but they're also incredibly rewarding in knowing how it will play in the readers mind. I hope. Sometimes my brain is stuck on a blue screen and I'll crawl into bed to reboot.

Next in the series is Writing Method.
The first in the series was Interface