A Catch-up about letting go.

Over a month since my last post and in that time I've written over 70'000 words on the speculative novel, THE VOTE, turned 54, and jumped into Magic: The Gathering for the first time in over thirty years. I've also taken down the 2026 calendars from my home office wall, deciding that their presence looming over me with the days marked off with a giant red X and multiple deadlines noted in blue were more a stifling presence than the inspirational/aspirational one I had intended them to be.

So they're gone, replaced instead by a yellow and blue poster taken from the Ted Lasso DVD box set.

Just that simple act of removing a year's worth of reminders, deadlines and checklists and replacing it with this even simpler poster took a weight of stress and anxiety from my shoulders I didn't know I had been carrying around.

So I did the same with my writing.

I'd been trying to force this speculative fiction from the idea in my head onto the page. I'd tried various formats, POV's, styles and even different genres and none of them were satisfying. They were all just damn trying too hard. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good story and I'm sure I'll write it one day but now doesn't feel the right time. Sometimes it takes a month or so and 70'000 words to discover that.

Instead I'm writing something that has waited nearly thirty years to be written. I tried it once before but I wasn't ready to tell that story. I think I am now. But it isn't going to be forced. Or rigid. Or even structured.

Gone is the 6 pages a day tracker. Gone is the rigid outline. Also gone is the laptop for the rough draft, replaced instead by 4 Pukka Pads of narrow ruled paper and a new gel ink cartridge for the Parker pen my wife bought me years ago. There's no hard rule of writing every day - if I miss due to being tired or there's too much on, then I won't beat myself up or force myself to write just for the sake of doing so and checking off a tracker.

I'll just write, moving a little closer with each paragraph, each line, each word. I would like to have the first longhand draft done by September 2027 though, but if it moves beyond that - or finishes early - so be it. What matters most is the novel now; not how long the book is, or how many words or when it is finished. What matters are the words chosen, the rhythm and the language and the act of writing longhand slows me down enough to truly consider that each time I sit down to write.

And that was another weight gone from my shoulders.

And the last thing I've realised in the month since I last posted, is that the enjoyment of painting toy soldiers is no longer there. It just doesn't fill me with the joy it once did and despite an attempt to once again force it as a hobby (I looked at the Games Workshop/Hachette Spearhead subscription - £50 a month, £150+ in needed paints and hobby tools) I just couldn't summon the excitement or justify the cost anymore. It was also something my wife didn't really enjoy and we wnated a hobby we could do together.

So I've sold off the last few boxes of models I had waiting to be worked on and used a little birthday money to get the latest beginner kits for Magic: The Gathering instead, that trading card game of magic, creatures and lands. We'd played this before together many years ago (apparently I was a bad teacher of the game) and it was something we could both enjoy without too much of a time or money investment.

The Beginner box is the best place to start, coming with two starter decks (Cats and Vampires) of 40 cards and then a further eight smaller Jumpstart decks of 20 cards each. After learning the game with the Cats and Vampires decks, you can take two of the smaller decks, slap them together to make a new Deck of 40 cards and get playing. This provides a vast number of different combinations and lots of gameplay as we learn the rules.

And that is another bonus: the two guidebooks walk you through the first 6 turns of the game using the pre-made decks and then you're on your own. It also comes with everything you need including cardboard game mats, tokens and 2 spindown life counters - D20's to everyone else.

And then there's the Starter Collection.

Over 350 cards which can be used to build countless different full game 60 card decks in a variety of different ways. I spent an hour yesterday just sorting them into the five different colours: Black, Green (my two favourites), Blue, Red and White, plus artifacts, dual mana lands and creatures. The box comes with a good storage solution for these, and I'll be reading these to learn more about them as we play the beginner box. We're also going to be collecting the Jumpstart packs as there are, I think, 46 different themes to collect, each one being 20 cards.

It's a fun, light hobby but one that people do take very seriously. I've been watching YouTube videos the last few weeks, and the Masters Tournaments that they host are crazy events. Crazy, but gloriously fun to watch. For us though, it's just going to be kitchen table playing. Games of Jumpstart to begin with as we learn, and then look at putting together our first 60 card decks.

There is a Hobbit theme of cards currently out and a Star Trek theme coming soon which might need to be looked at if we do really get the bug. But like the writing, I'm not forcing anything.

Reading wise, I'm now into the third of the Dark Tower series. This is the book I didn't finish thirty-five years ago so it will be the furtherst I've ever gone on the quest for the Dark Tower - I've already read further than I did the last time and I'm really enjoying it.

I didn't send out a newsletter last month as there really wasn't anything of note to say, plus there was no reason to send the first chapter of a story that isn't going to be finished any time soon. There may not be a newsletter for some time - we'll just play that one by ear.

Rediscovering Stephen King and rebuilding my King library

It probably comes as no surprise that one of the first authors I fell in love with was Stephen King. The announcement of a new Stephen King book release was a big thing in our house when I was growing up, Salem's Lot my introduction to this writer of horror (as he was typecast back in the day).  I would queue up on day of release to grab a first edition hardback (just as I did with Terry Pratchett books).

Over the years I grew a vast collection of his novels, from Carrie through to Lisey's Story. And then I needed to raise some cash and sold off my books. Since then I've had a few books from charity stores, or World of Books (a great source of second hand books at good prices). 

The last Stephen King book I bought previously was back in 2023 when Fairy Tale was released. I never read it until last month, and just finished it this morning. A great story well told. While reading it I decided I wanted to build back up the entire collection of King's novels and short story collections.

So, of course I made a spreadsheet:

And so I've started tracking down second hand copies from a variety of sources and now have 15 books. 

I've now started reading The Dark Tower series, starting with The Gunslinger. Previously I'd only read the series up to book 3 of the seven book run, so I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in.

If I was to cite a comparison for the book I'm now writing, it would probably be Stephen King - I'm not saying it's as good as King; just that the type of story would be familiar to readers of King. Agent's and publishers always like to know what the market could possibly be for a submission so that's what I'm going to go with - I cited Lin Anderson as a comp for my Louise Miller crime thriller books.

The plan is to get a few books each month. Once I've read the Dark Tower series, I'll probably read something new, possibly a Terry Pratchett (I need to rebuild that collection as well, though we still have quite a few on our shelves).

Finding the correct voice for the story

Image by steve_a_johnson from Pixabay

It has been a busy month writing wise, seeing me start a fifth version of my new novel The Vote. The first version was a sci-fi dystopian version told from first person. V2 shifted perspective to third person, but still keeping it in the dystopian setting. As I wrote in a previous post I found I needed to start again having perhaps overwritten the outline (spoiler: it was an 18K word document). The third and fourth versions saw me bring the story back to modern day, first in 3rd person, then in first person but it still wasn't gelling.

And it was all down to not having found the right voice for the story yet. So let's talk about that a little.

First Person

This sounds like it would be easy to write. You're writing as the narrator with all their thoughts and beliefs, desires and dreams right there on the surface. I stepped out into the rain, savouring the sensation of the droplets as they fell from a dark sky filled with thunderclouds. This creates a very personal, intimate experience but the scope is very narrow - you're only looking through the eyes of this one character The reader (and the writer) therefore only knows what that person is thinking and feeling through the entire story.

Second Person

I've only ever read one novel written in second person and strangely enough it's one of my favourite books. My wife bought me a first edition for a past birthday - Bright Lights, Big City. The perspective is centred around the "you" pronoun. You step out into the rain, glancing briefly at the sky as if daring it to shout at you with thunder. This makes the reader feel like they are part of the story, that the writer was writing about them.

Third Person Limited

Often called "close third" allows the writer/reader to be inside one character, using the "he/she/they" pronouns. He stood in the rain, face turned to the clouds, eyes closed, feeling his face grow wet and hearing the thunder which rumbled with such intensity he could feel it in his bones. You can jump between characters, to explore elements of the story from other perspectives, each one moving the story forward.

Third Person Omniscient

Is just the same as above except the narrator knows more than the character, and sometimes lets little details slip. He stood in the rain, face turned to the clouds, eyes closed, feeling his face grow wet and hearing the thunder which rumbled with such intensity he could feel it in his bones. He didn't know the thunder he could hear was actually explosions as the attack had begun. This is basically the "god's-eye view" of the story.

So those are the different voices you can use when crafting a story, and I've been switching between 1st and 3rd person (with a couple of smatterings of omniscient) on this new book, not really feeling settled yet.

But I think I've found my peace with it now - no pun intended. 

The story is actually very large in scope - it affects the entire planet - but we are seeing it from a limited number of characters perspectives. For the dystopian version, the first person POV worked as it was an intimate look at marriage, relationships and the divisive nature of politics. That was the version that I outlined to death, going so far as chapter beats for all four books in the series.

I'm now writing the fifth version - and the one I'll be sticking with (I think) - which is 3rd person as it allows me to take a break from writing about one character and go explore with another. It was all going to be written from the POV of the main character, David, a writer who hides in the local library working on his novel when his wife thinks he's at work (he lost the job weeks ago). I had him meet a couple of characters and they are now breaking away, and the original plan was just keep following David home, but I really want to see what happens to the other two characters next, and I can't do that in 1st person.

This is why finding the correct voice for the story you are telling is important, and it can take many attempts, false starts and in my case over 70'000 words written, to realise just what is important and vital to the story and how you want it to be told.

And that's okay. It's all part of the fun of making shit up.

Allowing yourself to start again

Two or three months ago I started writing the overview and outline for my next novel. I'd had the idea for many years, even writing a few pages of it as a screenplay, but now after finishing and releasing the fourth Louise Miller crime novel, 'TIL IT BLEEDS, I wanted to write something other than gritty historical Yorkshire crime. Out of all my ideas, The Vote was the one that shouted the most to be heard.

So I started on an overview which quickly morphed from the original idea into something even larger in scope (and the original idea is quite a big one already). It changed from a modern setting into a near-future dystopian one, which in turn led me to creating an entire world-building bible complete with timeline, explanation of the new world system, technologies and more. So much more.

The knock on effect of this 12 page, 3000 word document was a much more detailed outline of the novel than I've ever done before. For the Louise Miller books, each one had a 1-3 page outline, with bullet points for each chapter; perhaps a sentence or two. This version of The Vote had 46 pages and over 18'000 words with each chapter being broken down into every story beat. I also did this for book 2 in what had now become a four book series. Even more, I had rough outlines for a further two more series all set within what I had now called The Codex Universe; 10 books altogether. Each with their own outlines.

I then started writing the first draft. If you've been checking in, you'll have seen the word count tracker rising steadily over the last month, getting up to 15'000 words - I've actually written a lot more than that, closer to 25'000. At first I was loving it, really enjoying getting the words down each day, aiming for 750 clean new words. Most times I got a lot more than that.

But pretty soon after starting, I found myself quite bored. I'd outlined the book so detailed that in my mind, I'd already written the whole thing. I felt there were no little avenues to go exploring, no secrets to unearth. It felt stale as well as slightly forced. Lucy had read some of it and thought it was really good but I just wasn't feeling it. I tried to get some inspiration by reading the last two original Hunger Games books as well as Station Eleven by Emily St. John, but that didn't work either.

So I stopped writing. I moved all the outlines, world bible and drafts to a new folder and saved it all away. Then I cracked open a new word document to write the original pitch for the story, which is:

THE VOTE: What if an alien vessel suddenly appeared over Long Eaton? What if all power, social structure and leadership failed? How would people react? What would be the fallout of such an arrival? And then, what if they demanded that the world give up half its population or face extinction and were given a 90 day countdown to decide by an electronic Vote. How would you decide? How would I?

I gave myself to the end of December to write the book, and have gone with a 1500 word a day target, allowing me time to write around my busy daily schedule, while at the same time ensuring I can get good, clean words down each day.

It's okay to start again, if not entirely from scratch, but back to the original idea. Sometimes you have to go several steps forward on a project only to have to scootch back a long ways to get it right. What I have written in the dystopian draft can be used in some way in the new draft. Certain names of characters and locations for instance will be re-used but tweaked slightly, or gone at from a different angle.

The main character, David Holt, is still a novelist. His wife is still Sarah and their two kids, Leo and Maya are still adorable. What I'm not doing is fully fleshing out the story this time. I know the beginning; I know the ending - that has never changed. I'm not going to bullet point the chapters just yet, but I have made a few notes for chapter 1.

This new draft already has 1000 words written and I feel a lot happier with them. That's not to say things may change again, but I'm hoping I'm on the right track this time.

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There was no blog post this week, but I did update the site, along with a few teasers for the new book I am writing.

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