Finishing draft two, feedback and planning a book sequel

I’ve finally reached the end of that long road between draft one and draft two.

I get the feeling that a third and fourth draft will somehow be deemed necessary by my future self when it comes to A Better Crown but for now, we have a second draft that I am happy to let people read. I guess this is the most daunting part of the process because now you can actually get some feedback on a polished draft and there is nothing worse than that. With a first draft you can always palm off your imperfections on the roughness of a first outing but now all those excuses are stripped away. I have to face up to the quality of my writing and that is where the doubts come sailing back in.

Thankfully I have a lovely writer in Indian called Sumbul (follow her on Twitter) several friends and an enthusiastic book-obsessed family who are all willing to be my testers for the second draft of A Better Crown so I can see just how far into or out of the shit my literary craft is.

I have no idea if I’m happy with the book all I know is that if you’ve worked on something for that long, after a while it’s almost impossible to see it through someone else’s eyes. I’ve written enough copy in my life to know that at least.

Anyway. Feedback will be listened to, obsessed over, and, possibly, cried over, before I finally make some more changes and produced draft three or four.

In the meantime, I’m writing a few more short stories for a couple of competitions, one of them being The Galley Beggar Awards and the other for the Manchester Fiction Prize. At the moment neither of my entries are horror or thriller based which my mother will be thrilled with but is filling me with a feeling that I’ve already deviated from my craft. In any case, I think the first entry is good. It’s about a man driving home from work and contemplating his existence so look out for that bundle of laughs.

I’m also looking forward to getting book two planned and ready. A lot of scenes spilt over from A Better Crown and will make up various points of the sequel so I have a solid base to build around already but the main planning still needs to be done. Because I focus on six point of view characters in the books I’m trying to map out individual storylines for each one and worry about tying them together later.

We shall see how that works out. All I can say is that A Better Crown will be more or less put to sleep and its follow up will be in the works.

I may even get out another extract of A Better Crown soon.

Stay strong, keep reading, keep writing.