5.5 Years

My good friend Charlie, of Various Altitudes, made me count how long I’d been working on Nikara. It came out to five and a half years. Mid-November it will become six years, which is slightly terrifying.

At the start of the project I had one page of scattered ideas and an image of a girl in my head. Now I have two and a bit books, and half of one of them is in bits again as I rewrite. I thought it might be interesting to run down what’s gone on during the years I’ve been working on it.

October 2005

A young girl popped into my head while in the shower (as so many good ideas do). She had no name, but I knew she was at a magic school and she was different. She was the only person in the school with magic and it made her fearful and excited at the same time. I quickly decided that was cliché and made her the only girl at school without magic instead. Having had plotting troubles with my previous books (most of which were unfinished) I decided to let her wander around in my head while I gathered ideas and mapped out a proper story for her.

November 2005

I decided to write a teen vampire novel (not a romance, ew) for NaNoWriMo. It soon ran out of steam and after a two week break I decided I’d gathered enough ideas for the young girl (and a name) to make a start. By the end of the month I had 40,000 words and wasn’t yet halfway through the first third of the story. Suddenly my idea was a trilogy. The prospect excited me. I was an idiot.

February 2006

After a little wrangling with some boring chapters I finished the first book. It had taken a scant three months and I was absolutely thrilled with it. I’d written until late at night most nights, and still woke up in time for uni, or even at 8am on the weekends (?!) to write yet more. I wrote on the bus, on the tram, during lulls between customers while on the tills at work (on receipt paper), at lunch, at home. You couldn’t stop me. They were the happiest months of my life, despite them being lived in the head of a fairly emo teenager with no friends.

April 2006

Being a good novelist, I put it aside for a month to let it grow old in my head. I cannot remember what I did that month.

May 2006

Being an idiot novelist, I thought that editing just meant reading it through a second time, fixing spelling errors and things that didn’t quite make sense. The story remained intact, and at the end of the month I sent the first four chapters to Critters.org, along with a request for dedicated readers who’d critique the whole novel.

June 2006

The critiques started rolling in, and they made me cry. I’d never received true criticism on my work before, and though I knew deep down that most of them had great points, it was hard. This was my first true step into improving as a writer. I got seven or so critiques on the first chapters. Half loved them, and my fairy-tale like storytelling. The other half hated them and thought I needed to embrace ‘showing not telling’. I listened to the latter, though I was proud that my prose alone was good enough for several people to enjoy it. Someone told me the first chapters read like a very detailed outline, and that I needed to expand the scenes hinted at. That person was awesome and I followed their advice.

Throughout the month I was working with the four dedicated readers I’d obtained as well. One gave up halfway through, one just gave me grammatical corrections (lay, not lie!), another gave me good, though brief advice. The fourth did a line-by-line on every chapter and now has a country in Amandil named after her. Katie was fantastic. She gasped in all the right spots (on paper) and gave me great advice, and stuck through right until the end. She was funny too, and I very much enjoyed our back-and-forth as she worked her way through the novel.

July 2006

I rewrote the first few chapters of Nikara and was really pleased with the result. There was minimal telling, though I hadn’t managed to erase an irritating time jump of seven years. But it was ok. I resubmitted to Critters and had a much better response.

August-September 2006

With Nikara “fully edited” (it was not) I started submitting to literary agents and gathering a few rejections. I also started writing the second book in the trilogy, The Third Essence. As soon as the first four chapters were done I sent them into Critters again and set about writing the next few chapters.

October 2006

My Critters critiques started arriving for the second book, and they weren’t bad. I, however, was. The second book involved two POV characters, something I hadn’t really attempted before. The timeline was difficult to sort out and it made my head hurt. Added to that, I felt like I had no plot. I’d used up so many of the plot points in book one, but I still had to get to the two other major points that resided in the second book. I had no idea how to do this in a way that made sense and had value and was more than filler. I was also increasingly hating uni, and my life in general. I decided to take a break, informed my Critters readers that I’d get in touch with them again soon, and then stopped writing.

November 2006-some time in 2009

Dark days. I couldn’t write properly. I was depressed. The plot, or lack of, was too complex. I kept trying to write and ultimately making myself more depressed. I’d take week-long breaks between trying, and then months-long, for fear that forcing it was making it worse. I forced it sometimes anyway, because I was so desperate to write, so desperate to finish the project. I made some progress, but it couldn’t have been more than a few chapters. I worked out a scant few plot points but didn’t really know what to do with them. When I tried writing them it didn’t hold any of the attraction it used to, it was difficult and painful and it made me upset.

There were a few times when I felt it was coming back to me. Early in 2008 I wrote a shortish story about the members of TW … if they were on a pirate ship in a fantasy world. I kept hoping, and trying.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but some time during 2009 I started to pull it together again. I got excited with my fellow novelists and I started working on chapters. And finishing them. And loving it. Nikara and Chynor were alive in my mind again, and on the page, and I felt alive myself.

November 2009

NaNoWriMo rolled around again. I’d started Nikara that month, four years previously. The second book had only a few chapters left to write, and I knew how they were going to go. I even knew how I was starting the third book. So I went for it, determined to win (not that I wasn’t determined every year).

I finished The Third Essence in the third week of November 2009. It had taken over three years, but I did it. My joy was … joyful. I ran into my mother’s room screaming about it and whooping and jumping for joy. She congratulated me and told me I was crazy. I ignored her obviously stupidity and went to bounce around the living room instead, jumping on sofa and yelling at the top of my lungs. I’m pretty sure there were tears as well. Then I got back online and whooped to my friends, the ones who understood what a joy it was, especially for me given how long it had taken. Finishing that novel meant more to me than either of the previous novel finishes. It meant my brain was back, my writing was back, I was back, my life was back. I’d overcome depression, the urge to commit suicide, the tangles of my own plot, and I’d DONE IT.

I flew into book three and on the 29th November I claimed my second win in NaNoWriMo, despite being in enough pain to be hospitalised. I ordered a NaNoWriMo hoodie, even though it was kind of expensive, and now every time I wear it I feel like I’m being hugged by my ability to be sane, awesome, and a great writer. It’s a good feeling.

December 2009

I stopped writing book three. At some point in the last year I’d decided that 1/3 of my plot was kind of lame (and by kind of lame, I mean I was embarrassed to admit I’d ever thought of it) and realised it needed removing. This would require a rewrite of the previous two books so I could continue with the third. At this point people began to get the idea that I was one of those crazy people who endlessly revises and is never satisfied, but as you can by the above timeline, I’m really not. Prior to this Nikara had been written once, then had the beginning changed quite a bit. I think I may have changed the beginning again at some point (I’m still not happy with it, actually) and I fixed a couple of things in the last chapter, but it had never had a full second draft. I’d been working on it for four years, learnt a lot about writing during that time, and it was really past time I updated the story to reflect that.

I knew rewriting book one would be a challenge, but book two wouldn’t need much altering. Because of the long gaps while writing it, I’d forgotten an awful lot of stuff. Conveniently one of those things was the 1/3 of the plot I wanted to remove, so there are scant few references to it in the second book (and all the more reason to remove it). So, I started rewriting book one.

January 2010-present

All the people who thought I was lazy and too perfectionist back in 2007/8/9 should have shut up then because they were wrong. They should actually be going on at me now, because I currently have no excuse for not writing. I’m just lazy. I’m entirely out of the habit of writing every day, and finding it difficult to get back into it. I think the fact that I’m a grown up now (ish) doesn’t help. I don’t take the bus to uni, I drive to work, so I have no time to sit and mentally blob out. I get home and I have to cook and clean and write emails for work, or TW, or pay bills, or nap because I’m exhausted. I have less time to write. But, I don’t have no time. Back in 2005 and 2006 I’d find 30 seconds all over the place to write, and at the end of the day I might have 200 disjointed words. I could still do that, but I don’t. Nikara isn’t in my head every day anymore, and while it isn’t the painful absence of the difficult years, it still makes me sad. I try and get her back sometimes, thinking about her while I’m cooking, or in the bath, or going to sleep, but it’s much harder to picture her and she competes with everything else going on in my head.

I don’t want to be like this. I want to write again, often and joyfully. I wonder if it comes down to being out of practise. I think I need to do something about it this summer. I need to make time to read (I’m currently gobbling down ASOIAF before DWD is released, so hopefully I’ll keep using that time to read other things), and I need to stop letting other areas of my life spill over into my evening. Too many nights I spend agonising for an hour over an email. Too often I end up reinstalling Windows on a laptop for work (my boss tells me not to take work home, but when else am I supposed to do it, with a full diary? It can be weeks before I have a spare two hours for things like that). Too often I end up on Reddit and lose an hour or two without realising it. So, I may have to set up a system. I’ll probably whine about it at first because I don’t like being scheduled, but perhaps I can use it to lead into something less scheduled that gives me time to pursue all the things I enjoy. We’ll see.