I started writing this in March of 2022… Well, not this-this, but Herringwood Messiah. The book I assume you read that made you come here to read more about it.
Either way, I was fully intending to ram out a story and publish it somewhere in 2023. Aiming at November, since that’s when the first book came out. Thought it would be cool.
Also thought it would be easy-peasy, because I’d already written a book and had a world and characters I could use. I did it before, I should be able to do it again, but smoother this time. Right?
I was fucking wrong.
Like an anti-vaxxer, or the average teenager, I thought I knew it all, and had to find out the hard way that I knew nothing.
Look, I can put words in a row until the cows come home. In fact, I have put some words in a row about a cow sort of coming home. But the act of writing wasn’t exactly the problem here. There was no angle from which the initial ideas I had looked good, and before I knew version 1 needed to become version 2, and version 2 needed to become version 2.5, right up until it became version 7.1. Which is actually version 9.
Somewhere around version 7.0 I figured I had it right, and I took it to an editor.
I was fucking wrong.
Which sucked, because I now had to basically restart a story I thought was done.
I mean, I like this whole writing gig, but I will always hate doing work that has already been done. The problem with my way of working is that I have to basically do things all over again to see where the new bits go, and what they’ll be.
Most of the time I’ll only have a general idea of what the story is about, and it’ll depend on something Eddie might say, or an off-hand joke that doesn’t even matter, where the story goes next.
In this case, the whole third act needed to be rebuilt. Or, let’s call it the third quarter. Because of that, the fourth quarter may or may not wind up changing as well, and things in there were referenced in the first or second quarter. Everything had an effect on everything, so I needed to start over one more time.
Sure, I had whole chunks ready to copy/paste, which sped up the process somewhat, but I still had to reread and rewrite as needed.
Despite all that, there isn’t a lot I can say about this story. As far As Souls Go had far more interesting or amusing things going on behind the scenes. But I wouldn’t be a writer if I couldn’t fill the empty space with pointless fluff, so go ahead and click the other links for an in depth review of nothing in particular.