Book number 3 – complete!

Right – I am very pleased to say that I have now completed the first draft of my latest book, which means I now have a bit of free time to start writing a few more blog posts. Thank you for your patience over these last couple of months, but hopefully you understand how important it was for me to prioritise finishing it!

As I’ve said in some previous posts, I’m not going to announce anything about the new book yet, since various people need to see it before I can say anything. I’ve got a title in mind, but the publisher (if indeed the publisher is interested) may want to change it, they might want me to re-write certain parts, so until I know it’s definitely coming out, I’m going to keep quiet. But do watch this space – hopefully I’ll be able to say more soon…

So I’m now in that strange come-down period after having finished a novel. It’s a very weird feeling (which I’ve only experience twice before, admittedly), since writing a book is a massive part of your life, and when it’s done you feel a mixture of satisfaction, excitement at what others will think (I haven’t showed it to anyone yet), and in a strange way, emptiness. You are still consumed with thoughts about what you have written , but it isn’t the same – you’re not thinking about how the story should progress, you’re thinking of little tweaks you might want to make here and there, whether a description should be improved, if the dialogue sounds right in that scene you’re not sure about – your thoughts become more fragmented, as less concerned with the whole. Basically, asides from some tweaks here and there, that story has left my brain, and been committed to paper. Or computer screen, if you’re being pedantic.

Yesterday was odd – I spent the entire day writing the final 7,500 words, with my wife saying she felt like she should be mopping my brow in-between chapters as you would do to a boxer in-between rounds. In the end there was no brow-mopping required, although she did bring me about ten cups over the course of the day, which helped enormously. Anyway, so I spent the day wrapping up the final set-pieces and completing the closing chapters. I didn’t finish all this until about three in the morning, and after that I was so excited that it was finished I couldn’t sleep! When you finish a book, you don’t just wipe your hands and go “done!” – you keep thinking about tweaks, and thinking about tweaks, and thinking about tweaks. You then think about tweaks some more.

But it does feel good to have book number three under my belt, even if it is just a first draft for now. Given I have a full-time job, writing a book in my spare time is bloody hard work, so it makes me very excited when I actually complete one.

I hope you’re all excited too when you see what it is…