My hard drive is a graveyard, littered with the bones of projects I've started and then pretty promptly killed off. I find getting started to be easily the most challenging part of any task. This is usually a result of fears and anxieties about whether it's working out, or whether anyone else will see the worth in it. It'd be easy for someone like me to splatter you with the old spiel of "Well, those fears are worthless! Who cares what others think, right?" and call it a day, but you and I both know that it's never that simple.

Somehow, I managed to push through that for the first time back in 2019 and in July of this year, I finished my first novel, the only one to make it out of the horrible first chapters. For a long time I had assumed that that would be the mountain I'd need to climb and that once I reached its peak, everything else would flow fairly naturally after that. In a lot of ways I still think that's mostly true. I'm incredibly proud to look back at that and say "hell yeah, I did that" and the responses have been amazing so far (thank you again to anybody who has picked up a copy).

However, that was, as it turns out, the easy part. September was a month of recognising that, at the end of the day, my work's only just begun. My goal is to start taking this work, and myself, more seriously. I know that I can make something of this and this month has been a journey of coming to terms with that.

"I'm a business person doing lots of important business...stuff..."

The first bit of good advice I had from a fellow novelist was to treat myself, my name, and my brand, like a business. I'm not a very corporately minded person, most of my writing being lathered in generally anti-capitalist sentiments, and I really struggle with the idea of marketing myself because the thought of putting out an Instagram post gives me crippling anxiety. So there's been a huge learning curve lately, just learning the general lay of the land and setting up an infrastructure within which I can start to put myself out there more.

The first of these new developments would be this website (and this blog, obviously, but more on that in a moment) I suppose. I set up a website many years ago on Wordpress, and bought a domain and all, but I rarely posted anything on it and, frankly, Wordpress is a funny one. I like its level of customisation and, if you know what you're doing with design and code, you can pull something stylish together. I, on the other hand, am a bit of a dummy at times, and going back to the old build was a bit overwhelming.

I guess, primarily, I wanted a new start. I wanted something eye-catching and easy to navigate, while being relatively simple and modular in design as I knew (and know, still) that I am prone to very sudden veers from the road I'm on, complete with the screeching sounds of a rapidly changing mind. I tried a couple of drafts on a few different services and decided on Wix in the end. For anyone designing sites with the main purpose of portfolio presentation and link collection, I would recommend it. The editor is really easy to use, with simple drag-and-drop sections that you can alter with very little prior experience with its systems.

It took me a while to decide on the design but I think I'm pretty happy with it overall. It was nice to have a fresh start too. My previous sites and blogs have felt like they're there more out of necessity, but now I'm actually excited to design new elements. One of those elements is this blog.

My aim with this is two-fold:

To showcase more of my writing. To hold myself accountable.

So the first point is fairly self-explanatory I suppose, but I'm not just trying to get my name out there more despite this being incredibly important for writers. I am specifically trying to focus on building a varied portfolio of writing. I'm hoping to start taking on clients for copywriting, editing, ghostwriting, and other services again, and being able to point to projects like this will provide people with more of an overview of what I'm capable of.

The second point probably sounds a little stranger, right? Well, the truth is that I struggle big time with commitment to myself. I tend to doubt myself, and when it gets on top of me, it's suddenly very easy to think that I've achieved nothing which then makes attempting to push myself even harder the next day. It's an unhealthy cycle, but I think this might be a nice way to snap it. You see, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of different things I've needed to sort out early on, and when you split your focus like that, it's very easy to convince yourself that you're not doing anything at all.

It's a bit like chipping away at stone. If you focus on one section, you might end up with a fairly impressive tunnel in no time, even if you have no hope in hell of fitting more than your hand through it. But if you're looking to dig yourself out, you need to focus on the wall as a whole, and when you're only pushing it back by a millimetre at a time, it doesn't look all that great when you sit back and take a breather. I know that was a flawed metaphor but just stick with me here. My hope with a blog like this is to have a collection of each of my months, something I can look back on when I start to get stressed, and point at when people ask that dreaded question:

"So, uh, how's the writing going?"

Like I said before, I used to assume that finishing and publishing the first novel was the mountain to climb. I think I built that moment up in my mind a lot when I first started it way back during my MA, I didn't have a lot to my name in terms of achievements or goals, and I kept thinking that the moment I put a book out everything would change. If anyone's seen the Bojack Horseman episode 'Good Damage', then Diane's internal conflict about her memoir and the discussion of kintsugi, the act of lining cracks in ceramic with gold, was a good representation of my struggles with The Enlightened Quorum.

I think I kept assuming that all the pain and trauma I had experienced, all the debilitating illness it had caused me, and the mistakes I made along the way, all of it would lead somewhere. This book would be a representation of those bowls, a set of cracked ceramic lined with gold. But, as the episode astutely points out, that isn't really how damage works in people.

When I published my first novel, I wasn't suddenly enlightened with the knowledge of how to heal, nor was my soul lifted into the sky on soft palms. No, in fact, I have felt very little since then. To reiterate, my pride in myself for disciplining myself to finally finish it is immense, but that damage didn't suddenly feel worth it. It was incredibly mundane but in a nice way. Let me explain:

Writing, and specifically novel writing, has transitioned from something I once thought was a possibility but mostly a pipe dream, into something that is now simply my job. And it's a job I love. I couldn't see myself doing anything else with my life and what I did feel lift from my shoulders, was the pressure to prove something to others.

I used to hate the question I presented earlier. When I met new people or even friends I hadn't seen in some time, the polite inquisitions into my writing used to fill me with a sense of failure. Some kind of ridiculous internalised pressure that I assumed they were also placing on me. I felt, somehow, like everyone was looking at me like I was a failure for every day I hadn't done it. I suppose, for some people in my life, it was pointed that way, but the majority of people just want to see what you can do and are excited for you.

I'm disappointed that it took me publishing the story to finally realise that, as I could have maybe taken some more time with it. On the other hand, I had spent the best part of four years putting it together and I felt like it was time to get out there and show people what I was capable of. I'm so glad that I did, truthfully, because I have reconciled within myself that I am more than capable of doing that again, and I now have an opportunity to do it even better.

a shared trauma

As I'm sure most writers do, I spend a lot of time overthinking the beginning of a story, attempting to sound far more intelligent than I am because I know that it's the most important part of any story. There's that voice that tells you if this bit isn't good, then why the hell would anyone want to read the rest of it, even though it doesn't matter because at this stage in the process, there isn't anything else for them to read.

With The Enlightened Quorum, I found myself frustrated very early in the process. I kept looking back on old projects and feeling annoyed that I could only get so far with a story before second-guessing myself. The setting and world behind the Reflections Saga was something I had already developed in my own time years prior, never really having a story that felt right within it, so I thought I would take a different approach that time around. Rather than meticulously planning the narrative from day one, I thought I would take a more exploratory approach and just kind of write what felt natural.

I started somewhere simple: A murder mystery. Now, this led to a fairly bland tale about a magic cop, and considering I picked up the writing again in 2020, this story very quickly grew tiresome for me. However, through this more natural, exploratory approach, I did end up finding the story I wanted to tell along the way. Elena, the novel's protagonist, actually didn't start that way at all, she was just the daughter of my original protagonist with very little input. But any sections I wrote from her perspective were just infinitely more interesting to me and captured an energy I simply could not match in the other sections. This was a net positive overall and on the whole, I don't regret trying to write a story like that. It wasn't perfect though and it led to a litany of problems in the redrafting stage. I suppose that isn't a shock, retro-fitting and rebuilding the entire first half of your plot isn't easy.

With the sequel A Shared Trauma, I decided to try and do things a little differently. I have a fairly complete story in mind already, it's been loitering around the old noodle for a few years, so I know roughly where most of the characters are going to end up. I suppose this is the nice part about writing a sequel, right? I should know what I'm doing by now, but let's not set the standard too high. The only section I wasn't fully decided on, was the beginning, and I wanted to be sure this time going forward that I was starting in the best place I could. So I spent a lot of September considering and planning the world around my main character upon her arrival in it, and then going ahead and writing an opening based on any new ideas/information I set out. Then, usually, a couple of days later I would have some new ideas and start over again, just focusing on redrafting this opening as many times as I needed to until I was happy.

My intention here was to start strong, and then use a similar approach to my first novel where I could discover pieces of the story as I went along, while mostly having a general guide to follow as I did so. I can now confidently say that I have a "first couple of chapters" that I'm very confident with, so I'm going to focus on continuing with this trajectory until I run into any serious issues.

I'm going to take a quick detour here and introduce to you to my first rule: Never delete anything.

Those many different versions of this book's opening aren't going anywhere, they're staying right there in the same folder as the main draft because that time won't be wasted. Everything you write can have the potential to end up being useful. This new version is a mix of sections from previous attempts, just ideas that I liked and wanted to include. It also, funnily enough, contains a piece of a short story I wrote years ago that, while I feel it won't be used in any other story, is still a solid piece of prose and it fits into what I was planning out perfectly.

Now, the important question is likely, did this work?

Well, I wish I could confidently tell you that, of course, it did, I am a genius after all. But none of that would be true, because, in all honesty, the truth is that I simply don't know. There is a chance that all I have really achieved this month is wasting my time rewriting the same section over and over, because I may once again get to the end of the draft and want to go back and rip it out again. However, that is one of the main inspirations behind starting this series.

We spend a lot of time looking back at our failures and trying to fix them, and do better next time so that it won't happen again. We run small experiments on ourselves to improve all manner of things, such as discipline, health, and sleeping patterns, and yes, our work (creative or otherwise) is likely the primary recipient of these microscopic levels of self-assessment. But we have no way of knowing if these experiments will work out, and trying new methods is never a waste of time. Failure is our greatest teacher, and nothing says that more clearly than the start of a book.

Thank you for reading!See you on 30/10/2023james asplin