A printed edition of my zero draft of The First Casualty. Gifted to me in the before times, under a different title and when I used my middle initials in place of my first name.
Maybe not the cleanest start to be late on my first ever newsletter, but so it goes and here we are.
Revisions on The First Casualty continue. They seem to continue at a painstakingly slow pace, but they continue all the same. The .docx file that I’m currently grinding through is titled The_First_Casualty_Final, but the grey reality is that it’s just the 7th or 8th draft, with three or four more lurking over the horizon. The hope is that the developmental edit I’m working on is the last one that’ll require significant rewriting, but seeing as I’ve never been through a line or copy edit, only time will tell. My editor’s largest note was scaling back dialogue and supplementing it with narrative explication from the POV characters. Although making these changes has required in depth revisions at a sentence by sentence level, they haven’t been as daunting as I assumed, and it’s been fun to notice tangibly how the manuscript is improving. His second biggest note concerned my use of bouncing between POV perspectives within a single chapter. A technique, one of several, that I employ due to it’s (superior) use by my favorite author, Joe Abercrombie. While I do plan on continuing to employ the technique, I’m going to tighten up its frequency and make sure that each POV has an arc within its chapter ( I’d often use it before just to show how two differently two different characters might encounter the same person or setting). I’m roughly 25% through this revision, with my word count increasing thus far from ~113,500 to ~116,000. Nothing to do but hope and pray the final number isn’t over 125,000.
The most frequent question I get asked is when it’ll come out and if I’ll have a “real” publisher. To which I always respond “I don’t know”. The truth is that I’d like to be traditionally published and see my book mass marketing and in stores across the states and/or overseas, but that’s not entirely in my hands. My writing has to be of a certain class that an agent feels it can be sold to a publisher, and then of a class in which a publisher feels it can be sold to the public, and even if it is in that class it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a market for it. And even if all those came to pass, a publisher would have to be comfortable with my very public support of justice for Palestinians, and I’d have to be offered an advance large enough to make me comfortable that my story will receive the requisite support it needs to succeed. Luckily, my editor is an agent and once I’m done with my current draft I’ll have an honest call with him about both the book’s quality and the current market. From there I can decide if it’s worth a round of querying or simply self-publishing. No matter which direction I go, I plan on releasing a print run for friends and family and have a friend doing the cover art, but much like with my own work, that goes slowly. If I self-publish, I suppose it’ll be the cover for all of the books. What I’m certain of is that I won’t release to either friends and family, or the general public until I believe it is of a quality I’m proud to put my name on.
Luckily, if I ever find myself burnt out on The First Casualty, it isn’t my only work in progress. I’m about 20,000 words in on the zero draft of its sequel, The Ruins of Discord. While it’ll require several drafts of its own, I’m not expecting nearly as many rewrites for Book 2, although like I said before, only time will tell. I am also in the very, very, early stages of a currently untitled contemporary novel that I’m not quite prepared to give any details on just yet. All I’ll say is that its biggest influences are Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Charles Portis and David Nicholls. Make of that what you will.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Hopefully, April’s report comes on time at the end of the month, but if I was a gambling man (I am), I wouldn’t bet on it.
“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
-Aeschylus