Finally getting published, editing your fantasy WIP and doubting your own work

It’s been a big couple of weeks, both for Boris Johnson’s nerve and my writing prowess.

After entering a dozen or so short story competitions over the past year I was finally shortlisted for the Lancashire Literary Award, 2020. I didn’t win the competition but my story The Right Honourable is still getting published in an anthology, meaning there will actually be a real book with my name on it. Its a small step but its a first step.

I can finally say that I will be a published author. Only 2,000 of my own words will be published but they are my words and that’s the key.

I’ll put The Right Honourable up on here as soon as its published.

Anyway, that’s the soppy shit over with, onto the work in progress news and some upcoming decisions about short stories.

A Better Crown is doing pretty well. I’ve become rather ruthless when it comes to discarding scenes, lines and even characters that clutter up the story line. I’ve had to cut some of my favourite parts and some of the more fantastical elements but a few of the better scenes can be recycled for other books and possibly the sequel to A Better Crown which I’ve started planning, roughly, very roughly. More on that later.

Part one of the book is now edited and in its second draft form. The structure of the book has been transformed slightly. There are now four parts, adding a bit of balance to A Better Crown which previously had a rather quick and ramshackle ending and an obese middle. It now weighs in at about 193,000 words which is a lot more manageable then the 220,000 I started with. Apparently that’s only a little longer then Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. I feel like its an acceptable length for a first book, especially a fantasy novel.

Despite the positives with editing I’ve started to have quite a few doubts regarding A Better Crown.

Writing a A Better Crown, the first time around, made me realise that being an author is all about doubts. You doubt whether the story is interesting or good, you doubt the quality of your language, whether the plot makes sense, whether the characters are at all relatable and, most of all, whether what you’ve written hasn’t been done a thousand times before.

When it comes to fantasy you are never going to reinvent the wheel and if you do it’s going to be a very ugly, rather unappealing wheel. You can only recraft and recreate small sections of that wheel to come out with something appealing and it can be achieved while keeping the doubts at bay. But those doubts only grow when you finish the first draft if your book and start editing, because once you start editing you have to finalise your world building and your lore, you have to lock in every character name, trait and more. That’s when you really start to worry that you might have just stolen all your ideas from Lord of The Rings, A Game of Thrones, The First Law and every other fantasy novel you’ve ever laid eyes on. I’m constantly worrying that the actual fantasy element of A Better Crown is just stolen and fabricated from everything else, that people are just going to start reading it and then say: '“Well this is basically just stolen from George RR Martin” or “this is clearly just a Tad William’s rip off.” I’m also constantly worried that I have too many troupes that are present in every other fantasy book, the wandering wizard, the prophetic figure, the future king.

I do keep reminding myself that troupes are what makes the genre. A fantasy without fantastical elements is no longer a fantasy, I know that they are key. But still, the doubts persist. It’s just part of the struggle of writing.

In other news, I’ve decided to start posting some character profiles to the A Better Crown page. I have an amazing artist working on character portraits based on my descriptions. I want to do a small profile for Choke Mortimer soon, just to give a little flavour of who he is and get readers interested, he’s certainly the most interesting and pivotal character to the series in my view and he features heavily in the first extract which you can find on the A Better Crown tab.

I’ve also got a new short story in the pipeline ready for the website. This one is actually quite special because it is set in Earthguard, the world of A Better Crown. It focuses on a story 20 years before the book but can easily be read as a stand alone piece. It was written to help develop a bit of a backstory to the civil war which has come to a close at the very start of A Better Crown but it has a lot of horror and thriller elements to it.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling from me. Look out for my next short story, read my other stories, read the extract from A Better Crown and get excited.

Stay strong, keep reading, keep writing.