Ever found the plan for a novel years after you lost it? I just did...

Here's a surprise and a half.

So, at the minute I'm deep into my biggest writing project in over a decade. It's called Polka, and it's about a pig who lives in a walled city and finds his small life magnified in ways he never wanted. At the same time as scribbling away at this novel, we are doing a lot of home improvement, and we've just turned the shit-tip of an outbuilding into a craft room. This has meant a lot of lifting and shifting of old stuff that hasn't been looked at in years. It's terrifying the amount of stuff you can gather over time. There was a street-ful of all kinds of mad things in that one building, including a spare sink, a selection of Easter bonnets, a disco ball, and something that once upon a time might well have been alive.

(Before we continue, can I say that obviously you haven't read this novel of mine that isn't anywhere near finished yet, but don't worry, this whole piece has a little point at the end, I promise. It wouldn't be like me to write something totally pointless.)

There was a box. In that box were some notepads. One of those notepads was this little feller:

This is volume 2 of my original 4 year old plan for Polka.

Modelled with my lovely Karen's fluid painting artwork.

I wrote about 120 (admittedly small) notepad pages of unusually (for me) detailed scene notes for Polka before I lost them. Some of these scenes are written as whole chapters, almost ready to drop straight into a book. There is no sign of the first notepad full of planning. The way things go round these parts, that may not be seen for another four years, and won't that make a nice prompt for another lovely blog post?

It has been somewhere between four and five years since I saw these pages. My heart hurtled into my throat. I almost didn't read it. After all this time, after writing 80,000 words of this novel, did I really want to look at this lost plan and discover that the route I was now carving through the story was inferior?

There are so many differences between what I had done then and what I'm writing now. It's like two people in completely separate places were given the same basic premise, the same opening scene and left to their own devices. In fact, that's exactly what happened.

There's a moral to all of this. Stick with it.

Character-wise, Polka (the main pig) is a bit more sure of himself. That's not a big deal, but in my current version, he's more introverted, not quite shy but definitely happiest when in his own world. This gives Polka a better arc, as against his wishes he is drawn out of this inner existence and into real life and it's challenges. A bigger change is in the character of his best friend, Nayt, who in the early version is a lot more brutish (hogish?) and ends up turning against Polka. Their relationship is far stronger and more nuanced in the new version, I'm pleased to say. There are characters in the old plan that aren't in the new write, and vice versa.

It's amazing to see how differently all the events in this later section of the book pan out. Without that first notepad of scene planning, I will never know quite how I got to the situations I scribbled out in notepad two. The only thing I know for definite about the lost notepad number one is that the first two scenes are exactly the same. There is a flashback to a young Polka being locked in the cellar by his particularly hardcore Grandfather Pig (known as Grandhog), and then the story picks up with Polka and Nayt heading to a public speech by the leader of the city. After this, the tracks diverge.

 Beware: spoilers for a novel that doesn't exist.

The biggest difference by far, however, is in the matter of good and evil. The antagonists are very clearly bad from the outset, Polka doesn't seem to ever make a bad decision, the forces of good are unquestionable. In the version I'm writing now, everything's shaded in greyscale. Even the 'goodies' have done things they aren't proud of, or are prepared to do unpleasant deeds to get where they need to be, or it's simply difficult to tell which side they're on. There are those who would overthrow, but can we believe that they would do a better job?

I feel, in a way, like I've made contact with an earlier version of myself. Much has happened in real life between Then-me and Now-me. Then-me seems a little more idealistic than Now-me (although that too is shades of grey - I've always been something of a cynical bastard). I've long held the belief that the past is gone, it trundles away as soon as it's been seen, but I've stumbled upon myself from the year 2014, and although it's a bit of a one-way conversation, it's fascinating all the same.

So, what am I trying to say to you here? I want you to know that your work is incredibly rare (unless you are copying something someone else has sweated over and simply changing a word or two here or there - shame on you!). There is only you who could write exactly what you are writing in this moment. Even the you from four years ago, four months ago, four weeks ago, maybe even four days ago couldn't do what you are doing today.

Don't wonder whether you would write better in the future. There are other stories waiting for you there. This story you have is for the Here and Now.

Get on with it, and let us all see what you've got.

Laters.

Is it okay to write two novels at once?

Back to writery stuff about writering.

I've gone back and forth about this question over the years. A long time ago I used to write two novels (unrelated) in parallel, but as none of those have ever seen the light of day, it seemed safe to assume that this was not the world's greatest writing technique. I enjoyed it and got plenty done... but you've never heard of Dog Dinner, have you? No. And yes, that is a bad title. What of it?

We all have our different writing styles, favourite places to be, our preferences regarding paper or word processor, which underpants we should have on. But, should you ever take on two projects at once?

For clarification, I'm not talking about the writing of a series of books all in one go. If you plan from the outset to do a trilogy or whatever, bang 'em all out from the outset, don't pause. I wrote a sequel to Macadamian Pliers, but only after writing a couple of other books first, and man was that a task, so difficult to pick the threads up (and if people think A Graveyard Visible is dark, I'd love to dish them up a slice of Mac 2). What I'm discussing here is two completely separate stories with no characters or settings in common.

The closest I've ever come in the last 5 or 6 years to writing two stories at once would be during the creation of my latest novel A Graveyard Visible, which is currently undergoing an incredibly interesting pre-release process of review gathering - that's code for 'the reviews I'm getting are all over the place'. Halfway through, I stopped writing it. Couldn't go any further. It was dead. Tens of thousands of words in, I buried it (only ever happened once before, with a pirate story called Shanty for the Soulless which I'm currently considering for revival). So, after a period of glumness (we writers a miserable bunch of bastards) I got stuck into a new novel. I was most of the way through that when A Graveyard Visible dug itself back out of its admittedly shallow grave (one of those big light-bulb moments came out of nowhere - you gotta love 'em) and I hammered on until the end.

This is what you want - 

a bloody big idea

Since all of those shenanigans, I've finished another novel called Ten Doors Down (about a girl who breaks her phone and has to take on an incredibly strange job in order to save for another), and started my current project, Polka. It's about pigs. Oh yeah, a city of them. A whole society of pigs, a complete world, and everything a world is made of. It's become way bigger than I expected. I'm usually pretty good at getting a novel wrapped up in 80k or under, but with Polka and his personal journey I'm sailing towards eighty thousand words pretty rapidly and the middle is nowhere in sight. Now, I think the realisation of that fact freaked me out. There's a lot of work to do, and everything has to remain consistent. Polka, the titular pig, has led a small life in the walled (and guarded) city when we meet him in the first chapter, but when there's a dramatic change at the library where he works and a rebellious friend returns, his whole world flips and he starts to see what's on the other side. It's far more political than anything else I've written. It's about the disconnect between politicians and the people they govern. It's about loss, how large the pain can feel and yet how small it can seem to the world around you. It's about personal empowerment. It's about what a drop can do to an ocean. In some respects, 'Polka' is almost a playground for me to grab hold of a lot of the issues that affect me, to turn them round and hold them up in new lights.

Two months ago, it slowed to a near-stop. Not a complete halt, mind you. There were still a few words trickling onto the page. This was not a catastrophe of A Graveyard Visible proportions. The story was still there, and I knew where I was heading (or at least a had a piece of the map). But the weight of it...

We writers are always looking 

for that ray of hope.

The usual stuff - a change of activity, leaving it alone for a day or two, going for a walk, trying a chapter from a new angle - wasn't really giving me the bump start I needed. The only thing for it was a holiday. Not merely a real-life trip away for me (although by all the known gods I love getting away somewhere new). I had to get myself off to a new world.

The sneakiest and peakiest sneak-peak

of Flip.

The new one's called Flip (this flipping is a lot more literal than Polka's series of revelations), and for now I won't say much more, other than there's humans, and magic, and monsters. Starting a new story is always brilliant, and even though I'd had a false start with this one back in NaNoWriMo, a second attempt at the start of February went very quickly indeed, and I got a lot done (for me, anyway) in a short space of time. Now, I had a bit of a concern here. Writing lots is great, but what if I just kept writing Flip, and Polka died? What if I couldn't go back? The thing is, I was writing again, the energy was back, and as soon as I returned to Polka, the pages started flowing again.

Now, if they were both set in similar human fantasy worlds, and both had magic, and both had horror elements, and both were from the same point of view, then I don't think this would be feasible. There would be bleed between the two pieces. There would be forgetfulness, there would be a stylistic blur, and it would simply become too difficult. However, the fact that Polka and Flip are so very different actually helps me bounce from one to the other. Flip may never be finished. But if it's only reason to exist is to help me get to the end of Polka, then I will be forever grateful.

To conclude, I think it's possible to pull off this two novels at once thing... but only if both stories are very different. There can be little-to-no cross-over in regards of character type, theme or, if possible, style. Otherwise, everything could blend together and you'll end up with two indistinct piles of mess.

The moral here? Go on holiday, real or imagined. It's good for you.

Laters.

P.S. A Graveyard Visible is out soon - April 27th 2018. The horror novel that reviewers love to love, or love to hate. Go pre-order it now. The dead won't wait much longer...