Wolf

I’m a big advocate of reading. Read all the time. Read everything. Some writers will tell you that they don’t read while they’re writing books or find it difficult to find the time to read while they write, but these people are babies, I’m sad to say. You should always be reading, if’n you intend to write.

Otherwise, who cares.

I’ve been thinking about the structure of this book a lot. Since this is the story of someone going to a magic school, it feels like I should get to the magic school by about 100,000 words into the first novel, at the very latest. Yet I’m about 70,000 words in and nowhere near the magic school, geographically and temporally. And so I’ve been asking myself just what this story actually is.

Is it the story of a magic school? Well, no, obviously not. But I think if you promise a magic school, most will want you to hurry up and get there and then stay there for most of the series.

And while two days ago, I was still thinking of this as a trilogy, I think I may be working at a much different scale than that. And this was a problem needling at the back of my mind, keeping me from even admitting this to myself until this morning.

For me to make this fit into a trilogy or into a neat package, it would assume that I’m going to publish this in a traditional manner. But I have yet to find an agent for any of my books and most of my books remain unpublished, despite trying in fits and spurts to get some of them out there. There may be a host of reasons why, and one of them may simply be that I am a bad writer.

I don’t believe that, obviously. I present this as a bit of evidence, sent to me by the acquisitions editor of a major press:

“Thank you for letting us hold onto the manuscript for a bit longer. I unfortunately need to pass on this one – it’s simply too literary for this particular imprint. However, I’d like you to know how much I enjoyed the book. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else quite like it. Your writing is extremely strong and you have a real knack for characterization.

This kind of feels like a Tor project to me, or maybe something for 47North. If you haven’t queried agents yet, I would highly suggest finding representation and submitting there. I’d be happy to pass on your name and the manuscript to a few agents I know who love these kinds of projects if you’d like!”

But editors are subject to their own tastes and desires and so on, but I think it’s quite clear to myself and anyone who has read my work that I am not bad at this. Of course, skill is not necessarily the most important part of becoming a published author, let alone a successful one.

But because publishing seems disinterested in me, for whatever reason you may fill in here, I must find my own way.

And so I do not need to conform to the structures and expectations of the publishing industry. I can do weird and wild things, structurally. Like spend 300,000 words writing about the childhood of my protagonist.

This is where we’re heading, whether anyone likes it or not.

The second arc of this growing story will take place in a large city in contrast to the small bordertown of this first arc, and this circles back to the first paragraph above because I’ve been reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson this morning and it solidified something that’s actually in the original story.

You see, in the original published version of Twilight of the Wolves, there is a city dealing with a disease. Steven Johnson’s nonfiction book about the cholera epidemic in Victorian London is an eye opener for me as a person, but especially for me as a writer, and especially as the writer of this specific book.

And so while that city arc will involve a thieves guild, the destitute orphans, class politics, and a host of other things, it will also now deal with the difficulty of an industrializing city and how to manage waste.

This last bit probably doesn’t sound especially interesting, but just wait until you see what I have in store.

Every book I’ve ever worked on has been a patchwork of the many works of art I’m ingesting as I go, and so it’s no surprise that I’m stumbling into work that’s well timed to bolster and steel up my ideas.

It’ll take a while for me to get to this next arc, but I suppose you can think of it as Book Two. I’m probably within 50,000 words of the end of this first arc, which we may as well call Book One.

Once I get to the end of Book One, I’ll need to go through and make sure there’s enough interest and bombast to keep people reading through this childhood.

But I’m confident in my abilities as a writer. And I’m excited to see what pours forth out of this, because I have often said that if your novel must have filler, make that gourmet filler.

We’re likely not gourmet yet, but I know where the ingredients lie, have the technique well in hand.