Don’t get me wrong. I’m effing proud of my new book, Verse for the World-Weary.
I think it’s the best thing I’ve written to date.
But many times during the authoring, I’ve regretted starting it. That’s because I’ve been balls deep in The Slip Saga.
My new series, The Verser Volumes, has undoubtedly sucked away time from The Slip Saga, and will suck even more in future.
That said, as of a few days ago, I’ve completed the 4th draft of A Phantom in the Forge (that’s Book 2 of a 3-book series). Big fucking phew right there 😅. So progress is being made, just not as fast as it otherwise would’ve been.
So why start a new series?
I committed the first idea of The Verser Volumes to screen on April 7th, 2023.
More than 3 years ago.
I hadn’t published anything yet, if you can believe that.
I was bouncing between editing 3 different books of The Slip Saga:
- A Mirage in the Memory (3rd draft of 4)
- A Spectre in the Stream (5th draft of 7)
- A Phantom in the Forge (2nd draft)
By that stage, I’d been editing for so long, I was desperate to write something new.
The experience of writing a first draft is very different to subsequent drafts. It’s almost a completely different skill.
There’s a delightful buzz to it; a sense of wonder and pure creation.
Also, bowel-clenching terror. Because the next page doesn’t exist yet. It’s somewhere out there in the vacuum of space. The Great Unknown. We human beings aren’t too fond of the unknown.
Once you have that first draft, though, you’re messing with something substantial. Something that already exists. You can look at it and say “damn, that sucks centipede balls,” or “I’m feeling that down in my gooch.”
And because first drafting is its own skill, it needs to be flexed. It needs practice.
At the time, I worried my skill for first-drafting was vanishing, day by day. (spoiler: my fears were unfounded).
So I decided to start something new, clear in my intention that it would minimally impact my work on The Slip Saga.
I decided:
- I would commit an hour of my writing time each day, no more.
- I would make these stories novella-length, around 30k words each.
- I would write something episodic, with each book self-contained, not needing a continuous narrative (and therefore, extensive outlining).
Fast-forward to today, and all of these get a big ❌ for FAIL, because I didn’t stick to a single one.
I wrote 7 chapters of Verse for the World-Weary without an outline. I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do, and the characters involved.
I was fucking loving writing it. Reed was such a dickhead, I adored writing his scenes. The other characters popped into life around him.
Possibilities birthed from my imagination like teenage acne following triple-choc brownies. Everything was going swimmingly. I was making progress on 2 fronts!
By Chapter 8, I realised I’d fucked up.
The book was shorter, sure. Comedic, yes. Irreverent, yup.
But the series was also going to be another multi-volume, interwoven epic.
I’d set my characters up against a backdrop that included system-spanning artificial intelligences, galactic superbeings, warring alien races, and mysterious magic users that know the future.
Oh, and of course, more plot reveals than swimmers in a semen specimen.
Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t help myself, it seemed.
These days, with a bunch of books under my belt, I know that’s what I do.
I love reading a tightly-packed series, lovingly crafted by an author who ushers you from one delight to the next, with surprises at every page turn.
I write what I want to read.
So I accepted my fate, halted Chapter 8, consulted my drawing board, and outlined the fuck out of that sumbitch.
Verse for the World-Weary clocks in at 63k words. A short book, but still twice as long as intended. Kinda inevitable when you tell a story from 5 POVs 🙃.
It is episodic. However, I envisioned each book as an episode of an hour-long TV show you could drop in and out of without too much trouble. Like an episode of Red Dwarf, or Star Trek.
But it’s probably more like The Expanse, where each episode builds on the last.
Oops.
I can’t say I regret it, though.
I mean, just look at the sexy fucker my muse shat onto the page:
It’ll be up for sale on July 23rd through my website.
But there’s a cheat code if you want it NOW, for FREE.
The code?
I’ll send you a copy if you agree to leave a review. Some folks call that an ARC (Advance Reader Copy).
You can apply for an ARC here, and find out why I love the damned thing so much.