Yesterday I finished the third draft of my new book, Good People. It’s at the stage where I’m ready for beta readers to look at it and tell me everything that is wrong with it.
I’ve had to be creative not just with the story, but my attitude toward writing this time. With my first book, I was about six drafts in when my son was born. I completed the writing and most of the editing without juggling the book and a baby.
Bit different this time.
When I started writing my new book, I had a toddler, then midway through my daughter was born. Having a toddler and a baby, along with a full-time job is not ideal writing conditions. Free time is a rarity and when it comes, you’re often too tired to do anything! So I had to adapt. With Flying Ant Day I would write in chunks, sitting at the computer for anything from half an hour to two hours. That was not possible this time.
I grabbed any time I could. Sometimes writing for five minutes, sometimes twenty, whatever I could take. I wrote on lunch breaks, babies naps, just before bed, just before breakfast. Whenever I could. My company gave six months paid off for paternity this time around (when my son was born, it was two weeks) so that helped. But with that amount of time off, there’s no excuse for not being hands on Dad, and writing was quite far down my list of priorities. But of course all those little bits of writing added up, and I found it to be an efficient way of writing.
I’m buzzing about this book. I think it’s better written than Flying Ant Day was at this stage. I know this because when I read the first draft, I cringed far fewer times than with Flying Ant Day. Now, that doesn’t mean the story is better, or the plot is more exciting or the characters are better (although I hope they are), but the actual writing is better, it flows better; the sentences are stronger, the word choices are better. This is from the experience I had going into this one. I had a book already under my belt and everything I learnt from that has gone into this one. This meant the editing process was very different. In a previous post, I explained how in the third draft of Flying Ant Day I cut out 8000 words! There was far less cutting out this time as I didn’t waffle on so much in the first place.
My plan was for this book to be shorter, tighter and it a bit more fun than Flying Ant Day, which was a full on serious thriller. So how is that working out? In terms of length, it’s sitting at 84,000 words, about 5000 shorter than Flying Ant Day, and I don’t think that will change much. That’s still longer than I planned, but the story demands it. Is it more fun? Yes, up to a point, it certainly has more humour in it, but in some ways it ended up being more serious than Flying Ant Day. There are complex, serious themes in there. It’s strange because I like to think I have a good sense of humour. I was a stand-up comedian for five years, but when I write a book, it comes out quite serious. Comedians are serious people, I always say that. The most funny people I have ever met are all, deep down, serious people. Funny people ARE serious. It goes with the territory. “The opposite of funny isn’t serious, it’s unfunny,” the old saying goes.
So it still has some work to be done. I’m sure those beta readers will give me lots to work on, but right now I’m thrilled with it. I will publish it sometime this year, and I’ll keep you updated.
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