A victory and a reflection.

I've finished the second draft of my book.

I don’t much like to reflect. It’s something I always hear talked about as being good and important, but I’ve never been comfortable with it. I don’t like to linger, to sit and dwell on pretty much anything, whether bad or good. I want to move on, to the next goal, the next challenge, the next shiny new thing.

When I finished this second draft a couple of weeks ago, I was asked a few times what I would do to celebrate, to which I said I hadn’t a fucking clue. Sitting with my achievements is nearly as uncomfortable to me as sitting with a difficult memory. There was a time when I might have got myself a bottle of whiskey as a reward, and the thought did cross my mind, but those days are well behind me. Instead of binging alcohol I binged Baldur’s Gate 3, and thought maybe I should actually write the newsletter I still hadn’t got around to.

I don’t remember exactly when I started writing this book. It was sometime during the spring / summer of 2018. At the time I was pretty confident it would be about 160,000 words and it would be the first book of a trilogy.

The five years I’ve spent so far writing it have been one egregious humbling after another, and I don’t doubt there’s more to come. But I am very glad of my naivety at the beginning, that I couldn’t have comprehended how long it would take or what I would go through with this book. I would never have begun otherwise.

That first draft took two years to write. I finished with 328,000 words and the realisation that it would be a full-on series.

(Don’t come at me about publishing and standalones and word count. I know.)

The second draft I started in July 2020, with so much optimism and hope. I thought it just needed a bit of cleaning up and I’d have it done within a year.

Oh, my sweet summer child.

The first bit of “cleaning up” was cutting the book in half. Then it was restructuring all the beats to make that first half a complete story. Then it was gutting the story, carving a hole out of the entire second act and ripping out its entrails. Endless worldbuilding overhauls, research, even more structural reshuffling, a fuck ton of deep digging to get at the heart and themes of the story and its characters. Alongside it all I’ve moved house twice, been slammed with some hefty personal issues that derailed my ability to write for a good two years, and battled with a host of mental and physical health problems.

It’s been a journey, and a fucking tough one. On a good day, writing has been a few hundred words scraped out in the last minutes before I crashed at night. On a bad day it was a single sentence where extracting every word felt like pulling a tooth. Many days it was nothing at all. At my lowest, I sent copies of my draft to my closest people, in case the depression won and had me deleting every single word I had ever written. The heckling of self-doubt and imposter syndrome is a constant. Some days quieter than others, but always present. Taunting me for the sheer arrogance it takes for me to believe I'm good enough to write something of this scope and ambition.

The last few weeks of writing were different. As if all the different cogs of my life I had been trying to make work for three years stopped jamming and pushing back against me, and finally slotted into place. I broke into the last quarter of the book, and where the first three quarters had taken three years to write, the last quarter I finished in a month.

I posted the stats over on my IG, but I’ll share them here too.

3 years, 8 months. 43 chapters. 925 pages. 282,487 words.

The result is a draft that is a chaotic, Frankensteined mess. But it’s all there, and in roughly the right shape, too. It’s not pretty, but it’s the story I want to tell, full of heart, and I’m immensely proud of it.

Going forward —

My instinct is rush onto the next draft. I have such a clear vision of what I want to do with it, and even with so many logical reasons why I should take a break first, I’m having trouble justifying it to myself. I’ve spent so long on the first two drafts already; I don’t want to waste time. But I know my worldbuilding needs serious attention before I can begin the next draft, so I’m going to spend a month or so on that first.

I hesitate to set any goals with the third draft. Past experience and a dose of natural cynicism makes me wary, but still, at the least I’ll allow myself to hope it will be much easier than the last draft was. No matter how much that sounds like famous last words. If the last three years has taught me anything, it’s that I can fucking do it. I can see a difficult draft through to the end, regardless of the obstacles, of whatever shitstorm hurls itself my way.

As ever, thank you so much for your support. It’s still surreal to me that I have people at my back, in my corner, who are interested in my book and are actually excited to read it. Going forward, I’ll do my best to share more updates, and perhaps even more about the book itself if I’m feeling brave.

For now, I’ll leave you with its title.

Martyrs of Ash