My Fifteenth Novel Incoming

Also: Not Dead Yet

So here we have it—my fifteenth novel. If I’d had this many children, I’d be dead. Especially since my first novel was published when I was fifty-four. (Take heart, despairing pre-published twenty-somethings!) Given that I started writing in third grade, you might be thinking I spent an inordinate amount of time sharpening my skills. Or, at least, procrastinating. (Tip o’ the hat to fellow Ohioan Helen Hooven Santmyer, who was 88 and in a nursing home when she first hit the best-seller list. She died two years later.)

I’m going to push the notion that novels are like children bit a little further. After a first child, assuming things go smoothly, parents can get a little cocky. We’ve got this, we say to ourselves. We know what we’re doing. How hard could a second one be?

Pretty damn hard, it turns out. Every child is different. They present new and unexpected   challenges.  You don’t learn how to parent a generic child. You (hopefully) learn how to parent this one particular child. Another child comes along, and all bets are off. What you have is the memory of those small successes, of having solved this one problem with this one child.

Books are the same. Consider this quote from Neil Gaiman, attributed to Gene Wolfe, when Gaiman proudly told him he’d learned to write novels, after American Gods.  "You never learn how to write a novel, Neil. You just learn how to write the novel you are on."

Still. By now, it’s reasonable to expect that I’d have some kind of formula, or plan or scheme.

Plan? You mean—like an outline? A synopsis? A theme? HAHAHA.

The truth is, I’ve never learned to write a novel. All I have is the memory of having succeeded before.

I’ve been publishing about a book a year since my first novel, The Warrior Heir, in 2006. All big fat fantasy books (Warrior Heir was the shortest at ~110,000 words.) You’d think I’d have the hang of it by now.

But this one kicked my butt. This one took two years, even though it was the sequel in a duology—a two-book series. I’d created a litany of problems my characters had to solve. I had my world, my map, and my characters (most of them.) I’d done the research, and had the shelves of books, digital photos, and notes to prove it.

Why was this book birth so difficult?

I had a lot of mental and emotional shit going on. But, you know what—we all do. We all do.

Perhaps my process of setting everything on fire and then sending characters running every which way to put them out doesn’t work so well in a duology—a series with less elbow room.

Real Life Editor: This book is very long.

Author, snarling: Which character should I leave to burn?

It might be tempting to roll out the ol’ deus ex machina (it was all a dream!) (she was wearing a protective amulet!) but I knew my readers wouldn’t stand for it.

Indignant Reader: I don’t buy this!

Indignant Author: Nor should you!

It seems like I used to be better at distracting the Debbie Downer editor in my head who makes it impossible to get anything done. I’d get up early and write a few quick and dirty chapters while she was still asleep. If she woke early, I’d give her a stack of my old college philosophy papers to grade.

Now she’s there waiting whenever my hands hit the keyboard.

Maybe you’ve met her.

DD Editor: Seriously? You’re going with that?

Author: It’s fine. Everything’s fine. I can fix it.

DD Editor: If you say so.

Author: deletes three paragraphs

DD Editor: You can’t fix a blank page, you know. You’ve written negative words today. Maybe you should polish up that resume. Or retire.

With that noise going on, writing proceeds at a glacial pace. A pre-global warming glacier.

I won’t say I had writer’s block, because I kept extruding words—slowly, painfully, with my personal critic on my shoulder hissing into my ear. Lame! Trite! Pedestrian!

And I did not stop, even when it came to 250 words in a twelve-hour day. Not the way to make quick headway on what turned out to be a 600-plus-page book.

When I tell people about missing deadlines, I get very different reactions from normies vs writers.

Me: my book is six months late.

Normie: What do you mean, it’s six months late? Aren’t they going to fire you?

Me: I missed my deadline. My manuscript is six months late.

Author friend: Deadline? HAHAHAHA. I never meet my deadlines. Deadlines are just a suggestion. (Note: this might work if you are best-selling author royalty. Don’t try this at home.)

Other Author Friend: Must be nice to be under contract and HAVE a deadline.

You see, I meet my deadlines. Always have. Except when I don’t.

Turns out that two years is a long time, in a world when best-selling authors of teen lit produce a book a year. This is especially true of series work. When I announced a pub date for this book, a reader responded, “I thought you retired.”

Tip: nobody voluntarily retires in the middle of a series.

Even worse, at DragonCon this year, the moderator of a panel I was on said, “I heard that you died.”

Not. Dead. Yet.

And, yet—I finished the book. When I got out of the weeds and read it  from the beginning, I was ambushed by passages that sent my inner critic slinking back into her hole.

I wrote this?

There was still work to do, but it was not the literary hellscape I’d imagined.

A MFA professor told me once, “You know, your work could be quite literary if you took the magic out.”

This was meant to be a compliment.

After a long pause, she said, “I’m guessing you’re not going to want to do that.”

She guessed right. It is my job to put the magic in. There’s the rub. Sometimes, as writers, we are just too damned close to the work. Sometimes, as writers, we need to step back a bit to recognize our own magic on the page.

Bane of Asgard releases October 22, 2024 and will be available wherever books are sold. Bane is the conclusion of the Runestone Saga Duology (HarperTeen.) For more information on how to preorder, where I’ll be, and how to get signed copies, go here.