I’m back.
After a long hiatus, I’m finally back to being creative. Time has not been my ally during these last few years. So, this first blog will be dedicated to my process log – that is to say, this will be an account of lessons learned, procedures undertaken, approach, failures vs successes and review. This account of undertaking will be useful for my marketing ideas and engagement, but I also hope it will help guide future, would-be writers. Even for those who make the mistakes I have made, I hope it will act as an assurance that persistence is grit, and grit is the resource that fuels success.
First up; lessons learned. I was not ready to be a writer. It was 2015, I had just finished writing Chaos Cipher and creating a front cover for it. To say I was cutting my teeth in the business was to put it lightly. I was faaar from even that stage. Today, I’m cutting my teeth.
My first novel went through Amazon’s Create Space platform. I was keen to get my grubby fingers on a solid copy of my manuscript. They don’t call it vanity publishing for nothing. I wanted to know what it was like, to hold something I’d created. To see it as a finished product and to know that it was all mine. I wanted this because I believed at the time it would make me feel like a real writer and author.
The book arrived in the post (the box was damaged as was part of the book, but I’ll come back to that). I opened it, anxious, then beheld my copy. The feeling was – disappointing. There was a morsel of pride there, sure. I’d done something difficult, taken on a large, ambitious project and seen it through to product completion…sort of. Of course, I had no idea what the hell that meant back then since, the whole process in my mind ended with the book.
So, there I sat, annoyed that some FLT driver had probably missed the pallet and rode the forks into my book and damaged it slightly. But then – it was a huge book. I mean – it was a monster! A whopping 900 pages, (downsized from the original 1100 pages). It was a 9 X 6 inch print with a 12 font size comprising 36 unnecessary chapter segments and 3 parts. It stayed on my desk for a while as I contemplated its pages. From beginning to end, I’d read it. And although I tenuously accepted this was the end product, it didn’t sit right with me.
My partner and friends were jubilant, we even threw a little celebration to launch the novel. I had undertaken a large adventure and now I had to get this to publishers. There was just one problem…it was fucking terrible! This book was unreadable. Brimming with stream-of-consciousness thoughts, long, prosaic forms, flowery and complicated adjectives crammed into every statement. Two-dimensional characters that lacked motivation and came across as ridiculous. I even had one character there speaking this archaic, Shakespearean English. It was pretentious, overloaded, unfocused and confusing. The good guys and bad guys never even met each other. Unbelievable – how in the hell did I write a book for 900 pages and have absolutely zero conflict and zero tension? It was a feat only an amature could achieve – I had to face some very hard facts. I just wasn’t ready, and telling myself otherwise would have been a cowardly insistence.
But the hardest fact I had to face on realizing it was this – I wasn’t going to be ready for a long time, and I knew it. This was the start of a very difficult year for me. I had finished my Masters in English literature and I was left teaching for private schools and freelancing as a teacher and proofreader. I had no more big projects. No direction. No meaning. Naturally, some days, I didn’t even manage to get myself out of bed.
So there I lay, wallowing in self-pity and kicking myself for ever having started this rotten path. I hated myself for putting my ego in harms way. For ever having tried something ambitious and daring, only to be brought crashing down to a reality that said – You Suck! You’re not good enough! You’re too fragile! You’re too sensitive. You are not ready for this industry, and unless you get out of bed, you never will be. The effort had been huge – the expectations had been high – emotionally, I didn’t have it in me to do it all over.
I put off writing for a while. Chaos Cipher floated around on Amazon, haunting me with its clunky, pixelated, ugly design and its overloaded pages. It had one or two purchases from people who I’m genuinely thankful for and a kind, supportive review from my partner – but I’m brought to remind them all that I’m sorry, because that is the work of a writer who has no bloody clue how to entertain. We always try to improve out craft as artists, there is no final stage of mastery – mastery is a process of ever evolving techniques and ideas. Mastery, is navigating with intuition. Today, I see mastery as a life long pursuit, as I see writing and essentially everything I take on now in life. There is no end, there is only the point at which I am today. (Projects, on the other hand, must finish).
As Aldous Huxley once said in his preamble to Brave New World – “rolling in the muck is no way of getting clean.” So – I let some time pass. I pulled away from writing and decided to develop my fitness and meditation. Not long after this, my partner and I learned we were having a baby. I felt both excited and terrified. Was I really ready for this? Short answer, no. But then, I’m guessing people scarcely are. We spent the next nine months preparing for the baby, and in late February 2017, Lena was Born. A new journey had begun for us, one of parenthood. I kept writing in the late hours of the night. Somehow, I’d put together a horror novel (The Crawling). I’d put together some philosophical ideas that I wanted to work with but wasn’t sure how. I’d even written part of a western horror/thriller. There were ideas still kicking. There was some drive still buoying up now and then. But I was smitten with my little daughter. She is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. My life had been totally involved in her development.
So now it’s late 2018. Lena’s toddling and talking, and I’m balancing a work/life fatherhood. So, I dusted off my fingers and got back to it. This year I finished Zen and the Art of Squash, completing my 3rd book. I had even gone back to Chaos Cypher with the help of my friend and co-editor, Koben, who was largely responsible for rekindling the book and rebranding it with fresh ideas. The story was more focused, the characters defined, motivations cleared up. Finally, Chaos Cypher: Restitution Erebus was also over. I had jumped my last hurdle.
But something was still lacking. An approach. How do I really get going now? How do I hit the ground running? Well, dear readers, that is the basis of this website. Here I will document my progress as I go. I’m excited because now I have an angle. I have ideas, I have knowledge and I finally feel ready to start a professional career in writing. I have grown, pulled myself out of a very deep creative hole and moved on.
I will use this space to understand my industry, to understand audiences and to take each lesson as it comes, from the tough to the amusing I will roll with the punches and record my self-development. I wish to be all I can be, explore my strengths and weaknesses. But most of all, I intend to reach out to other creatives who share the same drive and energy and finally join a community I have hungered to be a part of for so long.
The foot is down, my first step has been taken. Time to cut them teeth!
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