Starting point

Well, the first thing to say is that the starting point of this blog is a hell of a long way from my starting point generally.

Of course, this shouldn's surprise anyone.

I've been writing all sorts of crazy unpublishable rubbish of various sorts for years, this is simply when I've decided to progress from hobby to serious.

The serious steps began with a third person fantasy noir (I'm a big fan of all things dark and dystopian) which I decided I simply couldn't progress with after the first chapter. I liked what I had written, I think the prose was nice etc but it just wasn't working for me, largely because the protagonist (a seriously evil bastard) was just too mary sue. I will revisit this one day as I've recently completely restructured the skeleton of the idea and powered him down to something interesting.

For now however, Project A (not a working title, simply how I will refer to it online) is a cyber punkish future noir (a term I've taken from Richard Morgan and personally love.) it's currently not actually even complete in draft 1. I have 120k pages and it's not yet finished.

Writing has been a gradual process, while I know now exactly how I'm going to finish it, when I first started all I really had was an idea of a world and a foul mouthed extremely elemental main character that I loved.

This of course leads to a point for any starting point of any project, but particularly a novel. You must believe in it and believe it. Well duh I hear you say, but it amazes me currently how often I hear such pessimist crap from unpublished authors commenting all over the shop.

Writing is hard, writing a book is harder, writing a book anyone wants to read is harder still and then there is the whole process of getting the industry and then readers to pay attention. It's hard.

If you keep slamming your head against the form rejection wall it's because you haven't found your voice, your characters or your story yet. Keep trying, I sure as hell will.