Carrying the Rock, and Putting it Down

Honestly this is how heavy a novel feels when I'm ready to let it go.

There’s always a point where I must force myself to stop with a novel. Where I put the rock down and pass it on to someone else. It’s not a finishing point, but a pause where I can get some distance. Novel’s take up a lot of my brain space, I write slowly (though I can write fast – there was a year where I had five books on the go) and if I don’t create an artificial pause, I’d never let the damn things go so they can come back at me.

I put the rock of my novel down yesterday and passed it on to my first reader – in this case my partner. The book’s structure is pretty sound, but I can feel a few wobbles, and I want someone else’s opinion now – there’s scenes in this book I’ve rewritten twenty times. There are bits of clunky dialogue, some odd transitions, and some stuff that doesn’t quite make sense. But it’s closer than I’ve been in years to seeing it finished. I reckon there’s only a few months more work until it’s a submittable book. I’ve even sent off a brief blurb to my agent – that I could manage that is also a good sign that the book has a comprehensible shape and that I can talk about what the book is about (at least from a story point of view).

This week I also wrote the blurb for the next bit of the project that Brent and I are working on. The second book is (almost) ready for the editors at Puffin. Writing these has been fun, having Brent as a second brain is fantastic, he’s great at refining first drafts, and resetting the broken bones of stories and we make each other laugh. I’ve learnt a lot about my process working with him, which is cool this late in a writing career.

Oh, and the artwork I am seeing for the first book is incredible – we did a deep dive into books we love and the books out now in this genre, and I feel like Brent’s taking it to some exciting places. There’s something classic and fresh about his style and getting new artwork every few days is incredible.

Finally, having put down those two bookish rocks, I can finally give much more thought to the new book and its shape. It’s one thing to be ambitious, it’s another to meet those ambitions. All I can do is pick up the rock and see where we take each other.