Stay On Target

Hello everyone. It’s been a little while and, I admit, I’ve neglected this blog of mine for too long. It hasn’t been for nothing, of course. I’ve been keeping my head down and pushing myself to complete my first draft which I’m beyond pleased to be able to say that its almost finished.

It also hasn’t been entirely effortless either. While I may have made a great deal of progress towards finishing the first draft of my first novel, there have also been a great deal of nagging thoughts, worries and stresses to go with it.

The closer I get to finishing the first draft, a thought creeps in just a little further. What happens once I’ve finished? Yes, finishing a first draft is by no means a finish line. I still have the arduous task of editing and everything else I need to polish it off before trying with agents and, with any luck, publishers. But what happens then?

Whether I get taken on by an agent and a publisher, or I get turned down and nobody wants the book, what happens then? Now what? I’ve been writing this novel for that long, its hard to imagine writing about anything else. I may have small plans and seedlings of ideas tucked away but I’ve focused on this current idea with a lot of the dwindling brainpower I have left to dedicate to it. It’s hard to imagine what happens once I’ve completed it.

I have planned this novel as a hopeful trilogy, but that all depends on the success of the first novel, if it’s taken on by a publisher at all. I’d like to say I could always take the self published route, but the mountainous costs from marketing to beta reading and editing services make that an almost guaranteed impossibility. So it’s either traditionally published, or bust. This does not help with my struggle to see past the nearing horizon of a completed first draft.

Maybe it’s just the imposter syndrome rearing it’s head again. Perhaps I’m just anticipating this newfound enjoyment I find in writing going the same way as my attempts of a vocation in portrait drawing, (without devolving into a bitter tirade, we’ll just say that it clearly didn’t go well).

I guess whatever it is that’s going on, everything will hopefully be made clearer once I finish writing this novel. Whether it’s the more likely, negative outcome or the more hopeful, positive result, none of this matters unless I have a finished novel to take me to the finish line.

So, here’s to the slow march of progress, slogging towards an uncertain result in the hopes of success. See you all at the finish line.

Bookshelves

Hello everyone! Long time, no . . . reading whatever I say I suppose. I’ve been so busy trying to make more headway with the first draft of Pantheon Rising, I realised I haven’t posted on here in a good long time. So I thought ‘why not write a few posts about what inspires me to write?’. Let’s kick off the first post with – Bookshelves.

It sounds strange, I know. If not strange, maybe a little mundane but hear me out. I’ve wanted to write stories for a long time. Longer than I think anyone who knows me would’ve guessed. Odd little ideas for stories often wandered through my mind and I never figured out how to write them. It never occurred to me it was as simple as writing it down or hopping onto a computer to type it up and work on them till they were readable.

Anyway, on to bookshelves. Something I’ve always loved to do, and still do today, is going to Waterstones, WHSmith or even the bookshelves at any supermarket I might find myself at and just look at all the books on display. It does sound odd now that I’m reading it back, but there’s just something about looking at a selection of books and picking up whichever one ‘speaks’ to you, for lack of a better term. It could be the cover design that jumps out at you, something parents used to warn us about. But it could also be completely at random, and you’d surprise yourself with a book you never thought you’d enjoy.

Then this all evolved once I started toying with the idea of writing a novel. I wondered what it’d be like to walk into one of these bookshops, look on a bookshelf and find my name staring back at me among other up-and-coming writers and already well-established authors.

The chances are very slim, I know. But there’s still a chance, a possibility, of this being a reality. And who knows, maybe if it does come to fruition then perhaps my book could invoke the same reaction in others. It would pique their interest from its place on the bookshelf and they would pick it up.

This is one of the many thoughts, self-indulgent as it is, that inspires me to give this writing lark a damn good try.

Impostor Syndrome

That’s right, this lovely phenomenon has come around once again. Only this time, rather than wait for it to pass, I thought it’d be a nice idea to make one of these posts to talk about it instead.

Let’s start with a quick explanation of what this is. According to the all-knowing and trustworthy Wikipedia: ‘Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalised fear of being exposed as an “impostor”.’ Essentially, if you try to/actually achieve something worthy of praise or success, you either don’t believe you deserve it or you think you’re just deceiving everyone else into believing you’re something you’re not. It’s like saying you just get lucky when you’ve done something decent rather than say you’re actually good at that something.

This doesn’t just apply to anyone doing anything creative I would imagine, but needless to say, it certainly doesn’t help if you are. Take myself, for example. Writing my first novel is no walk in the park. The fact that I’ve chosen a novel to start my writing journey as opposed to the usually advised “start with short stories” route also makes all this a little trickier. If anything, it only makes the feeling of being a fraud much stronger.

A lot of the time, I do question myself. Who do I think I am? Why do I think anyone would be interested in reading my stories? How would I have a chance at getting published if I’m so inexperienced?

I know chances aren’t exactly high of a new writer being taken on by a literary agent and a publishing house, no matter their skill level. There must be at least thousands of submissions a day and you have to stand out enough to make it through the slush piles. But you don’t get anywhere if you don’t try, and I’m just delusional enough to think I have as much of a chance as any other writers out there.

But there’ll always be that small voice in the back of my mind. The one that takes on board all of the less optimistic knowledge I’ve learned from hours of advice on how to get published or writing in general. Every so often it’ll tell me that I shouldn’t even bother and just pack it up.

I don’t mean to make it all sound so doom and gloom, this is all very normal and I’ve found a lot of good advice when it comes to Impostor Syndrome. I won’t drag this on with listing it all so I’ll only mention the one that has stuck with me since I heard it.

If you’re having doubts whether your writing is good enough, chances are you’re probably better than you think you are. Those that tend to think they’re brilliant are the ones that aren’t as good as they believe.

That’s what I take comfort in. My ego isn’t holding myself up on some lofty pedestal, destined only to fall. I’m merely somewhere on the lower rungs of an immensely long ladder with only two options to choose from. I can keep climbing, or head back down. I think I’ll take the first option.

Chapter 9, The Ferryman and beyond

I’ll kick this post off with an apology for not being so regular with these blog posts. I did intend to make them, at the very least, semi regular but I’ve been hitting some decent strides with writing my novel and I’ve not wanted to break my streak.

I’ve somehow managed to complete an entire chapter of writing quicker than I have written the seven chapters before that. All by committing to my ‘200 words a day’ goal. Most days, I shoot well past the intended 200 words, fuelled by the freedom of knowing I’d already surpassed my daily goal. That, and the eagerness to write to see what happens next.

Which brings me to my next point. Writing chapter eight allowed me to dip my toes into the waters of being a ‘Pantser’, (for those that may be out of the loop or even concerned by the sound of that, this is the term for someone who writes with no plan or outline. By the seat of their pants, as the saying goes). Now that I’ve arrived at chapter 9, for which I have no solid outline, I’m writing the story purely off the top of my head and seeing where it takes me. I must admit, it’s a little liberating.

So much so, that because I’ve also decided to get started on writing my first short story, The Ferryman, I’m also going to be writing that in ‘Pantser’ mode too. Just to see how far I get. The temptation to plot it out is still there but I’m loving how the story is sounding already, and if i like the sound of it without an outline, why should I make one now?

I’m aiming for The Ferryman to be only a few thousand words long, (only, he says). After which point, I hope to try and send that out to publications and other places likely to be receptive to it. Test the outside world to see if my writing style is any good, as it were. So stay tuned for that, and of course, my first novel ‘Pantheon Rising’. The first draft is looking to be completed earlier than anticipated. Good stuff.

Short Stories & More

It’s not lost on me that so far, every post I’ve made on this blog has been about writing but doesn’t involve me actually ‘writing’. I mean this in the sense that while I may spend a lot of time writing these posts out, none of them are stories I come up with.

I still intend to write out some of my smaller ideas as short stories to post on here. Maybe if the story looks promising, they’ll be more of a ‘sneak peek’, but only time will tell on that front.

I definitely have some ideas for firm short stories, and some other ideas for stories that I feel could have legs to become full novels in their own right. The main issue, however, is when to write them. I’m almost halfway through my first draft of my first novel. In theory, I could be writing a short story here and there in any time I find suitable, but I feel I may probably struggle with bouncing between multiple stories and multiple headspaces to write said stories.

I’ll probably end up giving it a go before long, maybe writing a small and different story every now and then will help me brush up and polish my writing style. Something I am very much in favour of if I should continue this path. But I’m also hesitant to step away from my current project, even for a moment.

I’m hitting a fairly good stride lately. The story is flowing nice and steady and, if Ive figured it out correctly, I’m currently ahead of schedule to finish the first draft. So it’s hard for me to decide when a good time would be to hit pause, refresh myself by writing a smaller story and then resume my main project. At the moment, I personally don’t see any short stories being written until the first draft is done at the very least.

For now, I can share that the short story I’ve roughly outlined is based on a theme for a writing competition I couldn’t enter. Someone finds a small black book, the rest is up to me.

Progress Marches On

After a week and a half of starting my new goal of writing at least 200 words a day, progress is coming along nicely. My previous goal of aiming to hit the average word count per chapter seemed to hinder my writing more often than it motivated me. In hindsight, I don’t even know why I didn’t write this way in the first place.

Maybe it was just the newcomer in me to think this was a good idea at the time. In the early researching stages, more into the “how do I do this?” of writing, I looked up a lot of things such as word counts of novels I loved reading, average word count per chapter, etc. While the word count for each different novel varied for a number of reasons, the amount of average words per chapter remained fairly the same. 4000 words per chapter on average, more or less.

So that’s what I used as a target. For the first 6 chapters of my novel, (8 if you count the two I removed to hopefully make two companion novels in good time), I would strive to hit at least 4000 words and if I did, I knew I was getting somewhere. This did work for a good while but as things went on, I found myself scrambling to close the chapter off once I hit this word count. I did manage to catch myself before it became a recurring problem, but it was a problem nonetheless. I was skimping on my story in places when I felt the chapter had reached a “decent” length.

So I switched things up. When I eventually tried to give myself a deadline to finish my first draft, my date of completion is relying on the condition that I must write at least 200 words a day. Needing to change my method, I decided this wouldn’t be a bad thing to try and swap out the old method for. And I was right. Writing chapter 7 has been more of a breeze than anything I wrote before.

The word count is a smaller daily goal which also keeps me writing daily AND with the progress broken up into smaller 200+ word intervals, where I’m trying to go with my story doesn’t seem so far away. I even have been more creative, if I dare say so, with this chapter. The outline for 7 was probably the least detailed out of the whole outline for the novel but I’ve somehow managed to come up with a whole bunch of other parts to add. And I reckon it’s because of this new method.

So March may have ended, but the March of Progress continues onward (see what I did there?)

Writer’s Block

After having several run ins with this infamous and terrible beastie, I figured there’s no better way to address Writer’s Block than to talk about it.

In general, whenever I’ve done anything creative in the past, I’ve come into similar roadblocks. Any time I’ve been pencilling a portrait or designing something for some imaginary importance, every now and again something would halt its progress whether it had been not knowing which parts of a drawing to shade or highlight, or hitting dead ends on design ideas. Always going back to the proverbial drawing board.

Now that I’m writing, and it’s officially ‘Writer’s Block’, I can confirm that this is something different. With portraits for example, because I draw from source photos, I can always refer back to them if I get lost. Beyond that, if I have absolutely no clue then my fiancée has always been my go-to when I need steering back in the right direction. She’s good.

The problem with writing a novel is when Writer’s Block strikes, you can’t necessarily do the same. You can outline your novel any way you like, which I have done, but I’ve personally found that I wander off the path of my outline and just start adding more and more detail off the top of my head that I didn’t think of before. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but when the new details conflict with the old stuff I’ve already written, I have trouble looking ahead when I can’t stop thinking about fixing the continuity or detail errors a few chapters prior.

As for getting an outside perspective on the novel, this doesn’t necessarily work either. Unless you happen to be co-writing a project or you planned your story with a partner, then it’s all on you. You are the only person who knows the story. Where it leads, what the characters experience, all of it is only in your mind as the creator of whatever world you conjure inside of your novel. For lack of a better word, it’s a lonely kind of creative block.

As gloomy as that may sound, it’s always been fairly short lived in my experience. I take a break to double back to what I’ve written so far or my outline to remind me of where the story needs to go. I crank up a Whisky Blues playlist or something with a bit more adrenaline and bite, swig a mouthful or eight of coffee, allow my fingers to tap away freely at my Bluetooth keyboard and sure enough, the story appears.

In short, to those who may be under the cloud of a creative block, (writing or otherwise), don’t let it big you down. Take a breath, find your motivation and go to work.

Pantheon Rising & Beyond

It seems only fair that I should dedicate a post to my first and current writing project. I do share a post every now and again to my Instagram and Facebook pages whenever I hit a noteworthy milestone or if I come up with some form of update to generate content but I never actually get the opportunity to lay a bit more information out there. Now that I have this blog, perhaps I can do just that.

Where to begin. I suppose at the start of it all. The concept behind my novel has been a thought floating around my mind for quite some time now. As a Norse mythology fan, (a fan of mythology in general, really) a particular tale from the Hávamál is what caused this thought to take root. The story of Odin’s Self Sacrifice. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to look it up or not, (knowledge learned being more valuable, and so on) but this left me with a strange but interesting thought. Well, I consider it interesting anyway. What would happen if someone were to go through a similar situation and found themselves linked in some way? This then linked to other mythologies that had similar stories. Thus, Pantheon Rising was born. Although, it had no title at the time.

The title I stuck with, and I hope to stay with, came about a little later. I played around with various options, all of which were incredibly cheesy and sounded a little like your typical YA fantasy fiction. Which is most definitely what Pantheon Rising is not. I would personally class it as a fantasy novel rooted in mythology. The word ‘Pantheon’ kept coming back into my mind whilst considering options for titles, and although it is a Greek word it just seemed to fit nicely. Better than anything else I could come up with at least.

I’m unsure whether anyone following along with the progress of this novel is aware of this, but I intend this novel to be the first out of three books covering this story. That’s right, I’m writing a trilogy. I have loosely outlined these two future novels and given them working titles, neither of which I’m going to share at this time. I would preferably like to make sure that I finish the first novel and see what kind of interest it garners, if any. I don’t want to start trying to build interest for books 2 and 3 if nobody is going to pick up book 1. Hopefully it wont come to that, but time will tell. Odds tend to be slim across the board when it comes to getting your novel picked up by an agent and a publisher, especially for a first time author but we’ll only find out how far I get once I finish.

The cover art I designed myself. If the novel gets picked up by a publisher, they would have an actual designer create something for the book but I’m very fond of my designs. Two in particular. The first I made on an iOS app version of Autodesk Sketchbook. The overall look tends to give off more of a standard thriller genre as opposed to something with elements of fantasy and mythology. So I designed the current working cover art, which happens to be my personal favourite. A bit more fantasy looking, I would say. I originally planned the colour to be blue instead of red but something about the red just feels right.

So there’s a little information on Pantheon Rising and what the future may hold if all is successful. I plan on sharing more details in the future, whether it be about my main character or any other parts of the novel that I would share insight about how the ideas came to be. For now, here are the two cover designs I mentioned earlier. You tell me which you would prefer if you saw them both in a bookstore.

Working On It

It’s been a few days and I’m still working on getting used to WordPress and the whole blogging thing. I understand you’re supposed to basically post your thoughts, feelings and opinions on these types of things but mine tend to be more scattered and sporadic. Never quite in order or necessarily available when I need them to be.

But, nevertheless, I am going to try. After all, this should serve me well for finding my voice in terms of writing style. Blogs are undoubtedly different than novels, even as a newcomer I know this. But the more I try to articulate my thoughts into words on a page, (or in this case, a screen) then it should come more naturally.

So, what to talk about? I’ve recently calculated an estimated completion date for the first draft of my manuscript of Pantheon Rising. Exciting stuff. 200 words a day should see it finished at some point this year. All that’s left to do now is commit to that target and see it through. Shouldn’t be terribly hard. At least, I hope not.

I’m sure to have good days and bad days. Some days I’ll struggle to type at all, and others I’ll somehow manage to type well beyond the daily goal. But we’ll just have to see where I am when I type those last words at the end of the last chapter.

Wish me luck!