Like many people here, I am interested in writers processes (and also notebook images) and have had some interesting discussions here on r / writing. Below is an extensive description (sorry) of how I published three books in just over a year and a description of the writing process from start to finish. Hope it’s helpful / informative in some way. Link to gallery: [https://imgur.com/gallery/iz1HwaG](https://imgur.com/gallery/iz1HwaG) ** EDIT: For clarity, these books are novels. Two is 27,000 words, one is 17,000. That is effectively a “standard” size novel. Sorry if that’s misleading, but I read a lot of novels and don’t really think about the difference. ** ** EDIT2: I was writing novels on purpose. ** How did I write three books in one year? I did not do it. Not really. About six years ago I had the idea for a novel / movie, a Scottish western, set in the highlands, and started some “research” on it (looking at Wikipedia and reading a mix of Westerns and Scottish history books. The fantastic A Journey from Samuel Johnson to the Western Isles of Scotland was a great influence). I took some notes, which I still have somewhere, but never looked at them again. A year later, during the summer, they typed a draft of this novel, about 30,000 words or so. Periodically, I would go back to it, edit and refine it, add sections, think about it, but I was never really happy with it. I really liked it and I liked the idea of what it was trying to do. I even sent it to a few small publishers and got some nice rejections: "Your manuscript is not without merit, but. . . "Two years ago I decided I was going to review it and I printed everything out, cut it up and pasted it into a notebook, rewriting parts, moving parts, and discarding entire sections. I removed around 7000 words by doing this, but since I was creating something, it didn’t feel like a negative action. I was making a cool notebook. At some point while doing this, the protagonist changed from male to female. A more surreal, psychedelic, hallucinatory vibe also began to appear. When I got to the end, it was time to write it all down on a computer. This part destroys the soul but it is necessary. It’s like doing a second draft (although typos and other errors do arise). However, it was very tedious. I don’t remember exactly when, but during the initial writing of the novel I came up with the idea for a sequel, set in America instead of Scotland. (There is a deliberately jarring flash-forward of the events of the third book in early drafts of this, the first novel in the trilogy, even before I had the idea for three of them.) Picking up the cut-and-stick notebook, to ease the boredom, I began to write a follow-up, which I considered to be a “bridge” between the Scottish-set book and its yet-to-be-written sequel set in America. . Every night for about a month, he wrote, not really knowing where he was going to go. I wrote for about 10-15 minutes, sometimes longer, but not long. All he had was the idea of Aoife (the main character in the first book) escaping across a frozen sea from a slave ship, pursued by bounty hunters. I wrote it practically in chronological order, following the ideas that came to me. If an idea came up for somewhere later in the book, I’d write a short note in the margin or on my phone. The narrative splits about a third of the way, cutting between Aoife’s journey and the bounty hunters chasing her. Rather than get bogged down in worrying about the pacing and structure of these sections, I wrote the two narratives in columns on the same page, continuing each one when I had an idea. This ended up being a novel of just over 17,000 words, with very little change between the first draft and the published book. So I had two books to write. Meanwhile, my friend and I (also a writer) had been doing a comic. We had finished the first issue (him writing, I drawing) and we were thinking of ways to publish it. Somehow we went from the idea of publishing a DIY comic, to launching a series of chapbooks, to starting a small press editorial collective using KDP. He called it Malki Press and the first published book was my novel, But God Made Hell, the second book in what I had come to think of as a trilogy. This one came out in May 2019, just over a year after I wrote it. But he was still not satisfied with the first book. I would open the draft on my computer and read and reread it, modifying it and making minor changes. He couldn’t point out what wasn’t working. I started writing the third book in the trilogy, it had an outline (which would mostly be abandoned) and the opening chapter. I wrote a few sections of it out of order, ending with a handful of chapters, the beginning and the end, before sitting down to write it correctly. I don’t remember where I read it, but I had heard of another author who was struggling with something and was advised to rewrite it in the first person. I have never written anything in the first person before and have been reluctant to do so. Too often, the character’s voice is too similar to mine and I quickly get bored. But I tried and quickly found the voice. I wrote the first two chapters before switching to the computer. Some sections could be left the same, descriptions of the landscape and other things that the protagonist could observe directly, and other sections would have to be completely rewritten. Other ideas came from this, of course, and I finished this “new” version of the novel quickly, in a few weeks. Since I was also working on (thinking about) the third book in the trilogy at the same time, I was able to include themes and ideas and recurrences between the two. I edited the manuscript as best I could, reading aloud from beginning to end several times. Then I formatted it as a paperback, ordered some proofs from KDP, and sent one to my publisher. I had read the first version of this novel, but not the new first-person version. The first time you read this it was like a proper pocket test. It was riddled with typos and formatting errors, but he could see that it worked like a book. It was published in September 2019 and was titled The Philistines Be With You. I picked up the third book, Cyclops from the Forge, over the next several months, reflecting on it, jotting down ideas as they came to me, filling the notebook back and forth with scenes, chapters, and fragments of dialogue. This one, he knew, was going to be bigger, in the narrative sense. (Not in terms of word count; he had decided to keep each book as short as possible, eliminating any unnecessary details. The rule was basically to cut out everything the reader could discover for himself.) The first book is a first-person narrative, telling the story of one person (mainly); the second is in the third person and has two stories; and the third, also in the first person, has three or four narratives that converge. When I filled out the notebook, I typed each story / section into a different document, filling in any spaces in those sections when I got to them. Once this was done, I started putting them together as a single manuscript, editing, adding and cutting as I went along. The edition of this book was much more simplified. When I finished the manuscript, I went back to the beginning and read it out loud, editing as I went. Then I formatted it as a paperback, edited more, and ordered proofs for myself and my editor. This test was the first time you read this. I had some suggestions, I took them into account, made more corrections and sent him the new version. It came out earlier this month, July 2020, fourteen months after the first book was released. So I didn’t really write three books in a year. I also didn’t spend anything like a year writing for real. More like weeks of concentration, months of mulling things over, and some intense episodes of editing, proofreading, and formatting. I’m never really sure what we’re asking when we ask authors how long it took them to write a book. Are we including time to think, to do something else while the idea is brewing, from the first draft to the published book? . . ? The first book in my trilogy took seven years or a month. Here’s a summary: * Book One: The Philistines Are With You: Summer 2014 – Initial Idea, Some Notes; summer 2015 – first draft; several touch-ups from time to time. . . ; January 2018: Cut, Paste, and Rewrite Drafts; August 2019: rewriting from scratch in first person; September 2019 – published. Total time: 5 years Time spent writing: a few months? * Book Two: But God Made Hell – January / February 2018 – Handwritten the entire novel, start to finish, in chronological order, in 15-minute chunks every night at the kitchen table for about a month. Write it down at some point with very little change. I didn’t touch it after that. May 2019 – published. Total time: 17 months Time spent on writing: 6 weeks (including the first draft, the new version and the published version) * Book three: Cyclops form the Forge: Summer 2019: I started writing some scenes in a notebook, I chose them here and there. hour; February 2020 – Focused on finishing the first handwritten draft, writing a short section each day; March 2020 – Write, edit, format, test; June 2020: revisions / corrections; July 2020 – Published. Total time: one year Time spent writing: three months?
Like many people here, I am interested in writers processes (and also notebook images) and have had some interesting discussions here on r / writing. Below is an extensive description (sorry) of how I published three books in just over a year and a description of the writing process from start to finish. Hope it’s helpful / informative in some way. Link to gallery: [https://imgur.com/gallery/iz1HwaG](https://imgur.com/gallery/iz1HwaG) ** EDIT: For clarity, these books are novels. Two is 27,000 words, one is 17,000. That is effectively a “standard” size novel. Sorry if that’s misleading, but I read a lot of novels and don’t really think about the difference. ** ** EDIT2: I was writing novels on purpose. ** How did I write three books in one year? I did not do it. Not really. About six years ago I had the idea for a novel / movie, a Scottish western, set in the highlands, and started some “research” on it (looking at Wikipedia and reading a mix of Westerns and Scottish history books. The fantastic A Journey from Samuel Johnson to the Western Isles of Scotland was a great influence). I took some notes, which I still have somewhere, but never looked at them again. A year later, during the summer, they typed a draft of this novel, about 30,000 words or so. Periodically, I would go back to it, edit and refine it, add sections, think about it, but I was never really happy with it. I really liked it and I liked the idea of what it was trying to do. I even sent it to a few small publishers and got some nice rejections: "Your manuscript is not without merit, but. . . "Two years ago I decided I was going to review it and I printed everything out, cut it up and pasted it into a notebook, rewriting parts, moving parts, and discarding entire sections. I removed around 7000 words by doing this, but since I was creating something, it didn’t feel like a negative action. I was making a cool notebook. At some point while doing this, the protagonist changed from male to female. A more surreal, psychedelic, hallucinatory vibe also began to appear. When I got to the end, it was time to write it all down on a computer. This part destroys the soul but it is necessary. It’s like doing a second draft (although typos and other errors do arise). However, it was very tedious. I don’t remember exactly when, but during the initial writing of the novel I came up with the idea for a sequel, set in America instead of Scotland. (There is a deliberately jarring flash-forward of the events of the third book in early drafts of this, the first novel in the trilogy, even before I had the idea for three of them.) Picking up the cut-and-stick notebook, to ease the boredom, I began to write a follow-up, which I considered to be a “bridge” between the Scottish-set book and its yet-to-be-written sequel set in America. . Every night for about a month, he wrote, not really knowing where he was going to go. I wrote for about 10-15 minutes, sometimes longer, but not long. All he had was the idea of Aoife (the main character in the first book) escaping across a frozen sea from a slave ship, pursued by bounty hunters. I wrote it practically in chronological order, following the ideas that came to me. If an idea came up for somewhere later in the book, I’d write a short note in the margin or on my phone. The narrative splits about a third of the way, cutting between Aoife’s journey and the bounty hunters chasing her. Rather than get bogged down in worrying about the pacing and structure of these sections, I wrote the two narratives in columns on the same page, continuing each one when I had an idea. This ended up being a novel of just over 17,000 words, with very little change between the first draft and the published book. So I had two books to write. Meanwhile, my friend and I (also a writer) had been doing a comic. We had finished the first issue (him writing, I drawing) and we were thinking of ways to publish it. Somehow we went from the idea of publishing a DIY comic, to launching a series of chapbooks, to starting a small press editorial collective using KDP. He called it Malki Press and the first published book was my novel, But God Made Hell, the second book in what I had come to think of as a trilogy. This one came out in May 2019, just over a year after I wrote it. But he was still not satisfied with the first book. I would open the draft on my computer and read and reread it, modifying it and making minor changes. He couldn’t point out what wasn’t working. I started writing the third book in the trilogy, it had an outline (which would mostly be abandoned) and the opening chapter. I wrote a few sections of it out of order, ending with a handful of chapters, the beginning and the end, before sitting down to write it correctly. I don’t remember where I read it, but I had heard of another author who was struggling with something and was advised to rewrite it in the first person. I have never written anything in the first person before and have been reluctant to do so. Too often, the character’s voice is too similar to mine and I quickly get bored. But I tried and quickly found the voice. I wrote the first two chapters before switching to the computer. Some sections could be left the same, descriptions of the landscape and other things that the protagonist could observe directly, and other sections would have to be completely rewritten. Other ideas came from this, of course, and I finished this “new” version of the novel quickly, in a few weeks. Since I was also working on (thinking about) the third book in the trilogy at the same time, I was able to include themes and ideas and recurrences between the two. I edited the manuscript as best I could, reading aloud from beginning to end several times. Then I formatted it as a paperback, ordered some proofs from KDP, and sent one to my publisher. I had read the first version of this novel, but not the new first-person version. The first time you read this it was like a proper pocket test. It was riddled with typos and formatting errors, but he could see that it worked like a book. It was published in September 2019 and was titled The Philistines Be With You. I picked up the third book, Cyclops from the Forge, over the next several months, reflecting on it, jotting down ideas as they came to me, filling the notebook back and forth with scenes, chapters, and fragments of dialogue. This one, he knew, was going to be bigger, in the narrative sense. (Not in terms of word count; he had decided to keep each book as short as possible, eliminating any unnecessary details. The rule was basically to cut out everything the reader could discover for himself.) The first book is a first-person narrative, telling the story of one person (mainly); the second is in the third person and has two stories; and the third, also in the first person, has three or four narratives that converge. When I filled out the notebook, I typed each story / section into a different document, filling in any spaces in those sections when I got to them. Once this was done, I started putting them together as a single manuscript, editing, adding and cutting as I went along. The edition of this book was much more simplified. When I finished the manuscript, I went back to the beginning and read it out loud, editing as I went. Then I formatted it as a paperback, edited more, and ordered proofs for myself and my editor. This test was the first time you read this. I had some suggestions, I took them into account, made more corrections and sent him the new version. It came out earlier this month, July 2020, fourteen months after the first book was released. So I didn’t really write three books in a year. I also didn’t spend anything like a year writing for real. More like weeks of concentration, months of mulling things over, and some intense episodes of editing, proofreading, and formatting. I’m never really sure what we’re asking when we ask authors how long it took them to write a book. Are we including time to think, to do something else while the idea is brewing, from the first draft to the published book? . . ? The first book in my trilogy took seven years or a month. Here’s a summary: * Book One: The Philistines Are With You: Summer 2014 – Initial Idea, Some Notes; summer 2015 – first draft; several touch-ups from time to time. . . ; January 2018: Cut, Paste, and Rewrite Drafts; August 2019: rewriting from scratch in first person; September 2019 – published. Total time: 5 years Time spent writing: a few months? * Book Two: But God Made Hell – January / February 2018 – Handwritten the entire novel, start to finish, in chronological order, in 15-minute chunks every night at the kitchen table for about a month. Write it down at some point with very little change. I didn’t touch it after that. May 2019 – published. Total time: 17 months Time spent on writing: 6 weeks (including the first draft, the new version and the published version) * Book three: Cyclops form the Forge: Summer 2019: I started writing some scenes in a notebook, I chose them here and there. hour; February 2020 – Focused on finishing the first handwritten draft, writing a short section each day; March 2020 – Write, edit, format, test; June 2020: revisions / corrections; July 2020 – Published. Total time: one year Time spent writing: three months?
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