The Curse Is Broken
Unsurprisingly, it’s been six months since my last blog post, because if there’s one thing I’m consistent at it’s being inconsistent with this blog. (Does that make me consistent after all?)
A lot has happened since my last post. I’ve moved counties and now live in Cambridgeshire instead of Hertfordshire. I lost a close family member. Tithe was longlisted in the Times Chicken House competition. I had to say goodbye to Rufus.
There have been a lot of ups and downs, and the downs have really dragged me down. Losing Rufus in the circumstances that I did was the worst experience of my life, and being without him is hard. I’ve struggled with my mental health for well over a decade now, and as stressful as having a dog can be, it’s the one thing that keeps me steady. The four years between losing Tess and welcoming Rufus into my life were my lowest. I can only hope that, when I’m ready, another dog will come along and keep me from going under.
Of course, none of this relates to the curse in the title of this post. Bad stuff happening isn’t a curse; it’s life. The thing that did feel like a curse was 2023, when I failed to write a single draft.
That changed this year.
Yes, I’ve done it—I’ve written another draft! Was it one of my outstanding WIPs, you ask? Langford? Pale Eyes, maybe? Creek WIP?
No. It was a brand new fantasy idea about sharks.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love terrible shark movies, the stupider the better. I was, accordingly, delighted when Netflix released Sous La Seine, a ridiculous film that manages to start like a real horror movie and end up being so unbelievable that any semblance of horror completely disappears by the end, though there was one scene that did really give me the creeps. Misguided activist Mika dives into the flooded catacombs to face mutant mako Lilith (I use the term ‘mako’ begrudgingly, as these CGI sharks were clearly NOT modelled off actual mako sharks) and encounters a baby shark, too. The image of her stroking that infant shark whilst the audience sit on the edge of their seats, gripped by the knowledge that something is about to go horribly wrong, stayed with me long after the tomfoolery that the rest of the film dissolved into. It got me thinking…
…what if I wrote a fantasy book that revolved around sharks the way that so many books revolve around dragons? What if there were shark riders, too, just like we so often see dragon riders? And what if the main character foolishly got into the water with a shark just like Mika did, and suffered a life-changing fate? (Though not as bad as Mika’s…)
Thus, Sharkfinn was born. The characters and plot came together so quickly for me that it felt like there were fireworks going off in my brain. I hadn’t felt that way for a long time—the last four books that I’d written/attempted to write had all been some flavour of spooky/paranormal, and writing a second-world fantasy felt new and exciting.
It took me four months, fifty chapters and just over 100k words, but I wrote Sharkfinn. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have to be. Finally, I’d completed a draft.
A big part of how I was able to finish a draft now when Pale Eyes WIP had defeated me so thoroughly before was that I changed my writing method. I saw a reel from Claribel A Ortega where she talked about her cosy writing method, and I immediately knew that I had to try it. I’d tried bullet journaling before but had never gotten anywhere with it, but that was because I hadn’t actually been journaling—just tracking my progress. When I actually began to journal before and after each writing session, I found that I was a lot more motivated to write, even after sessions that didn’t go so well. Processing the negative feelings through journaling allowed me to push on and keep going.
I also made a note after each session of what I wanted to change in draft 2, so I’m hopeful that, when I come to revise Sharkfinn, I’ll have a much easier time of things! I’m feeling very positive about this story and can’t wait to share it with my writing group. I’ll have to wait a little while though, as I have some other edits to get through first…
As I mentioned at the top, The Tithe That Binds—my YA paranormal/horror story about a monster hunter boy—was longlisted in the Times Chicken House competition! I was absolutely blown away that Tithe made the longlist and am so grateful to the people who championed it to get it there. While I was disappointed that it didn’t make the shortlist, I’m excited to receive the reader’s report and dive into further edits for Tithe, ready to query it again in the new year. For that reason, I’m holding off on editing Sharkfinn so that I can prepare to return to Tithe, and once that’s done and sent off to the query trenches it’ll be Sharkfinn’s turn.
So…what am I writing now?
Is it the long-awaited Langford WIP draft 2? Maybe Pale Eyes or Creek WIP at long last??
…again, no. I am so sorry to these WIPs—I do want to work on them, really. Something else has just come up, and that something is Evanesce. I’d fully thought that I’d shelved it after it was rejected by a small press and I realised that it would need a full rewrite if I were to ever try and query it again, and while I toyed with ideas for the rewrite (I actually saw in my Scrivener files the other day that I briefly attempted it back in March) I ultimately decided that I wanted to focus on writing something new. Well, I’ve now written those new things and have realised that it’s time to return to Evanesce, and I know just how I’m going to fix it.
I don’t know how much I’ll get done before the end of the year, but all I can do is keep going. When I’m trying to stay afloat, in the absence of my dog, writing is the next best thing.