Confidence is a funny thing, when you’re a writer. I’ve written elsewhere about my second book, The Falling Fire, and how I totally lost confidence in it about half-way through – an eventuality which then caused me not to write another word for seven years. Hasn’t happened for a while. For the last year, however, I’ve been working on an epic (700-page) technological thriller entitled Scherbius. This, I had decided, was going to be my blockbuster.
Then, when I’d finished the first draft of that, I put it to one side, and – in a somewhat bizarre but rather beautiful flash of creativity – I wrote a 60,000 word novella entitled The Last Great Radio Show (a title I’ve had knocking around for some time). I wrote that in precisely thirty-one days.
What is wrong with this picture? Well, unless you’re Dan Brown, or Stephen King or someone, you can’t plan to write a blockbuster. You can imagine you’re writing a blockbuster, but what you’re actually doing is, well, you’re writing a Very Long Book. Which may or may not be any good. As I came toward the second edit of Scherbius, I will confess that I had begun to be afflicted by Doubts. What I was writing seemed good to me. I love the characters, it’s a cracking storyline, full of good and evil and difficult moral choices. There’s plenty of action, a smattering of, well, kinky stuff, and all sorts of emotional, character-driven material as well.
It’s also, I fear, and I will whisper this, self-indulgent.
There. Said it.
Like a heavily-laden goods train on the East Coast Main Line, it’s too long, and it’s too slow. The pace of the story disappears in the telling of it. Plus, in getting rid of the stylistic tics which have been causing my excellent editor, Heather, to tap her foot with increasing impatience, I found that I had managed to create a whole new set.
All of this became evident when the first 90,000 words or so came back from Heather with a tactfully-worded but uncompromising accompanying email, saying words to the effect of: sort it out. So, there I was, a mere six weeks before my planned publication date, with an unpublishable epic.
It is, as Terry Pratchett might have observed, a bugger.
There was a period of agonising (some of it under the influence of cheaply-purchased alcoholic beverages). But I knew, deep down, what had to be done.
I’ve archived the sucker.
It’s going away, into its own directory on OneDrive, and it’s staying there for the Winter. Then I’ll go back to it, Heather’s edits and all, and see what may be done. It’s probably not going to be purely cosmetic, people.
In the meantime, I became conscious of a small but insistent voice saying; “Excuse me? Sorry? Awfully upset for you and all that, but I’m here, you know…”
It was, rendered in the voice of Arthur Dent (my subconscious is a strange and dangerous place), The Last Great Radio Show. And that, my friends, as I discovered when I re-read it, suffered in my mind from none of the problems which bedevilled Scherbius. Plus, well, my writing’s moved on a little bit. I’m looking in new directions, and Radio Show is a reflection of that.
But that deserves another post all of its own…