They Do Warn You About How It Goes.

Once again I finish a novel and find myself surprised with and educated about the process.

It is said that you never truly learn how to write novels. You learn how to write the novel you are working on right now. This has been true for me with all the novels I have finished (five). Each had its own way of being written, its own need to be constructed and teased out a certain way.

While not the hardest novel I've written, the Monster-Hunting Barista novel was, is, and I suspect will be the weirdest experience writing a novel I have gone through. I mean, it doesn't even have a title, and I've always had a title (at least a working title) by the end of the first draft. Granted, I haven't done any real thinking about the title. Once I start the second draft, I'll be more alert to things in the text that lend themselves to the creation of a title. Right now, though, I've got nothing.

It never really felt like I was writing a novel, not in the way the other four did. This is partially because it wasn't suppose to be a novel (neither were Last Car to Annwn Station or Dark Water Blues, but what can you do) and I never really wrapped my brain around the idea that it was a novel. It was, up until the last few weeks, the barista story. The part of my brain that seems to engage when I'm in novelist-mode never came alive. It was as if I was writing a short story that just happened to get out of control and end up at 43K.

Oh look! A short story. Oh, no, look again! A novelette (shift mental gears). Oh, actually, a novella (shift mental gears). Ah, it is a novel! Well, would you look at that (try to shift mental gears).

Yeah, that word count. Right now it's too short to be a real novel, which I think is also making it hard for me to see it as one, even through I've outlined several scenes to add that will bring it up to somewhere between 65K-75K, but until I do, I'm not sure the writer-brain is convinced it is a novel.

Also, I tend to be a linear writer, starting at Point A and ending at Point Z, with stops along the way. This time was different as well. I started out writing from one POV, Sharisha's. At some point, after several scenes with Sharisha as my POV character, I decided having another POV or two might give the story more punch, since there were things going on the Sharisha did not know about. I thought the reader should have that information, so I wrote scenes from the POV of one of her friends and from the antagonist (which I usually don't do). Then I added another POV character later, once I had resigned myself to it being a novella, and added a secondary antagonist with POV as well. So now I have five POV characters. I wrote their sections at different times, and I'm going back and writing more scenes from these five different POV's later.

I found it oddly freeing, because I could write stuff in another POV, look at what I had written placed later in the novel, add the section I was working on to an earlier point in the story, and make it look like I actually, you know, planned out this bit of plot instead of stumbling onto it.

One large negative to never hitting "this is a novel" in my head was that I started to feel like this was a story that was never going to end. Since I was still seeing it as a short (then novelette, then novella) I kept expecting it to end at 8K, or 12K or 25K or maybe 30K. And it seemed to go on and on and on...And as soon as I said to myself, "Self, this is a novel," BANG! I had the ending.

This might be the most commercially viable novel I've written. It has all the stuff of dark urban fantasy, and most important, it feels like the first novel in a series, something my other three urban fantasy novels do not have going for them (the Big Epic Fantasy Novel could take off into a series easily enough. You know, like they do). In the other novels, you know the characters are going to have lives beyond this book, but probably nothing as dramatic as what happened in these pages. With this last novel there is a sense of "Well, of course there's going to be more books. She fights monsters. She was fighting monsters before this book, and she will be fighting monsters after this book. There are always more monsters in the world."

All this to say, "Wow, that was--different."

They Do Warn You About How It Goes.

Once again I finish a novel and find myself surprised with and educated about the process.

It is said that you never truly learn how to write novels. You learn how to write the novel you are working on right now. This has been true for me with all the novels I have finished (five). Each had its own way of being written, its own need to be constructed and teased out a certain way.

While not the hardest novel I've written, the Monster-Hunting Barista novel was, is, and I suspect will be the weirdest experience writing a novel I have gone through. I mean, it doesn't even have a title, and I've always had a title (at least a working title) by the end of the first draft. Granted, I haven't done any real thinking about the title. Once I start the second draft, I'll be more alert to things in the text that lend themselves to the creation of a title. Right now, though, I've got nothing.

It never really felt like I was writing a novel, not in the way the other four did. This is partially because it wasn't suppose to be a novel (neither were Last Car to Annwn Station or Dark Water Blues, but what can you do) and I never really wrapped my brain around the idea that it was a novel. It was, up until the last few weeks, the barista story. The part of my brain that seems to engage when I'm in novelist-mode never came alive. It was as if I was writing a short story that just happened to get out of control and end up at 43K.

Oh look! A short story. Oh, no, look again! A novelette (shift mental gears). Oh, actually, a novella (shift mental gears). Ah, it is a novel! Well, would you look at that (try to shift mental gears).

Yeah, that word count. Right now it's too short to be a real novel, which I think is also making it hard for me to see it as one, even through I've outlined several scenes to add that will bring it up to somewhere between 65K-75K, but until I do, I'm not sure the writer-brain is convinced it is a novel.

Also, I tend to be a linear writer, starting at Point A and ending at Point Z, with stops along the way. This time was different as well. I started out writing from one POV, Sharisha's. At some point, after several scenes with Sharisha as my POV character, I decided having another POV or two might give the story more punch, since there were things going on the Sharisha did not know about. I thought the reader should have that information, so I wrote scenes from the POV of one of her friends and from the antagonist (which I usually don't do). Then I added another POV character later, once I had resigned myself to it being a novella, and added a secondary antagonist with POV as well. So now I have five POV characters. I wrote their sections at different times, and I'm going back and writing more scenes from these five different POV's later.

I found it oddly freeing, because I could write stuff in another POV, look at what I had written placed later in the novel, add the section I was working on to an earlier point in the story, and make it look like I actually, you know, planned out this bit of plot instead of stumbling onto it.

One large negative to never hitting "this is a novel" in my head was that I started to feel like this was a story that was never going to end. Since I was still seeing it as a short (then novelette, then novella) I kept expecting it to end at 8K, or 12K or 25K or maybe 30K. And it seemed to go on and on and on...And as soon as I said to myself, "Self, this is a novel," BANG! I had the ending.

This might be the most commercially viable novel I've written. It has all the stuff of dark urban fantasy, and most important, it feels like the first novel in a series, something my other three urban fantasy novels do not have going for them (the Big Epic Fantasy Novel could take off into a series easily enough. You know, like they do). In the other novels, you know the characters are going to have lives beyond this book, but probably nothing as dramatic as what happened in these pages. With this last novel there is a sense of "Well, of course there's going to be more books. She fights monsters. She was fighting monsters before this book, and she will be fighting monsters after this book. There are always more monsters in the world."

All this to say, "Wow, that was--different."