It's TIME FOR AN UPDATE.
In the post-George-Martin era of publishing, readers are anxious about series being finished and, since Martin himself has made his millions and is untouchable, they tend to inadvertently take it out on new authors... "I won't buy or emotionally invest in his work until the series is finished", etc.
It was a week to the day after my debut novel dropped that someone asked me about the sequel in the comments, and name-dropped George Martin.
A week.
But to be fair, I think a lot about George Martin, too. He exemplifies the pitfalls of authorial success. It's easy to get stuck, not just despite a promising beginning, but even sometimes because of one.
And I've gotten hit with some of those same pitfalls, so it's been a while since I released the last one.
Specifically, it's been two years and nine days. Not super long, not George-Martin long, but long enough to raise doubts, given that most professional, high-quality authors can generally manage to turn out about one a year.
If anyone is significantly faster than that, it's more likely that he is writing formulas, outsourcing a lot of the work, or something like that. Even famously prolific Brandon Sanderson, who is indeed fast, isn't faster than one a year with his main works.
But when you hit two years, it may not be time to panic, but at least it's time to ask what's up.
And the thing to do at that point is "exactly the opposite of what George Martin did".
In other words:
- Tell people what's going on, honestly.
- Give out facts, not promises.
- Be willing to change your approach or ask for help if you are stuck.
I won't spend six pages here explaining why George is stuck, although I know exactly. That's another topic.
But here's what's going on.
First of all, one of my wives got cancer.
Not "oh, this is technically cancer" cancer, where the word sounds scary but it's not actually a big deal.
Not "sleepless nights and a couple of surgeries" cancer, where you catch it early, and the high-functioning psychopaths with small knives go in aggressively and they're pretty sure they got it all.
This is was "you are going to die" cancer. The kind where she suddenly develops the worst headache of her life, and you rush her to the ER, and by the time you get there she's demented and raving and blind in one eye and they tell you she has a tumor the size of a golf ball in the right temporal lobe and it's bleeding into her brain and there's tumors all over her lungs, and you didn't catch it in time, it's out, the barn door is hanging open and that horse is gone, and surgery is now a game of whack-a-mole with life or death consequences.
The kind of cancer where a doctor pulls you out into the corridor and tells you, not in front of her, to start making the kind of plans you don't wanna make.
Well, that was a year ago. Since then, our lives have been filled with driving two hours each way for radiation therapy, with surgeries, with regular immune-system drugs that cost as much as your house, and make her sicker than the cancer ever did.
My purpose here isn't to provoke pity. Skipping to the end of the story, she's going to be okay. Not yet, she's still pretty damn sick most of the time, but the cancer is gone, and what she's currently recovering from is what we had to do to her to kill it.
But that was my year. When you're sitting in the hospital, you have plenty of time to think, even to write, since you have fuck-all else to do.
But you can't use any of that time. Not a bit of it. Because anxiety is the opposite of creativity, and even if you're a reasonably tough human being, not a snowflake, never needed Xanax or Welbutrin to get through your day, even if you can take the pressure and still function and get up early every morning to make her that special cancer-diet breakfast, and even tell her a joke and laugh sometimes...
Well, the part of your brain that writes stories IS a delicate snowflake.
It curls up in a ball and just shuts down.
Oh, I got a little bit here and there, trying to focus my head with sheer willpower. Hell, I spent three months test-writing and throwing away sketches and scraps as I taught myself to write from a female point of view. I sucked at this first, but I think I eventually got it.
But overall, there simply wasn't a lot of forward momentum to be had.
And I didn't already have a huge amount done before the diagnosis hit. Perhaps somewhere between a third and half. The demands of exploding in popularity, lots of podcast and convention appearances, learning to run a small business, all of these took a toll.
So, this last summer, as the treatments started to wind down and I could breathe again, I found myself in a pretty bad situation, progress-wise. You can put a brave face on it if you want, but when it's been a year and six months and you're halfway done, you're pretty deep in the weeds.
See, most authors don't get famous right away. Not even minor-internet-famous.
That George Martin guy we talked about, he spent years on the midlist. Most of you have never heard of Sandkings or Nightflyers or Fevre Dream. And if you read Armageddon Rag, you probably didn't read it in the 80s and you probably didn't finish it, because boy did it ever suck.
Even Sanderson, well, you've read Elantris, maybe, and it wasn't so bad, but you didn't read it until some guy you'd never heard of at the time got tapped to finish dead Robert Jordan's magnum opus.
Getting famous as an author takes ten years at least, and it probably should. Look what being the exception did to Patrick Rothfuss.
An author that's been in the game for ten years or so has his workflow down cold, and can get it done. If you've published one novel, and people start telling you you're the next Robert Heinlein, well... that feels great, but it's a lot to live up to.
So, to be honest, I was getting stuck in other ways than the cancer. Sitting alone in my room all day, trying to write something, anything, thinking about how late it already was, feeling like it's not only got to be great, it's got to be great right now, and I hate hate hate the way scene I'm writing right now is coming now, and suddenly it's turning into a two page rant about how this sucks and it's full of plot holes because the crystalline structure of silicon carbide doesn't work like that, or something.
The cancer was gone, but my writing process, my workflow, my headspace... hadn't healed.
So after a few months of beating against a wall, I did what George Martin refused to do.
After a lecture from my wives about how I was being far to hard on myself, insisting everything be great the first time it exited my keyboard, when writing doesn't work like that... well, I admitted I was stuck, revised my approach, and got some help.
Specifically, what I did was fill in some summary for the scenes I haven't finished yet to create a pre-alpha reading copy. And sent it off to three of the very few people I actually talk to about stories while I'm writing them.
@acrobatichobbit
@GraysonJams
@fyrewede
It's about 121,000 words. It's readable as a story, start to finish, full and complete plotline, etc. It's just missing some literal text.
Is it good?
Well, that's what I'm going to talk to them about. And they can weigh in here, too, in a spoiler-free fashion, if they wish.
But needed some outside feedback to stop obsessing over how late the second book is, and go back to just letting the writing process be what it's supposed to me.
Writing fiction is simultaneously the easiest job on the planet and the hardest. Easiest because you are answerable to no one, work on your own schedule, and have full creative control. Hardest because you are answerable to no one, work on your own schedule, and have full creative control... which means all the thousands and millions of tiny decisions are yours and yours alone, and if you screw them up you're going to disappoint a lot of people.
So, if you've never heard of my novels, and you're just here for the twitter rants, thanks. And I have no idea why you read this far.
But if you're one of those people jonesing for the sequel, I can't offer you a promised deadline. That way lies madness. But I'll do whatever it takes to get it done, cancer or no cancer.
And if you need help trusting me, consider this. The audiobook took a year, because I had to learn how to be a sound production studio in addition to a publisher.
But how was it when it arrived?
A late book is late until it isn't. A bad book is bad forever.
I won't let that happen.