Benedict Jacka

Well, after seven weeks of notes and planning, I’ve started what I really, really hope is going to be the final rewrite of the new book.  I’ve got this one labelled in my notes as version 5, which should be an indication of how many major changes it’s gone through already.  Here’s hoping that there isn’t a version 6 (or if it is, it’s minor changes only).

Rewriting is hard work, so I’m not looking forward to this very much.  It’s definitely necessary, though – the longer I’ve spent looking at my notes and plans, the more sure I’ve become that doing a rewrite was the right decision, and now that I’m about ten pages in and looking at the original version, I’m absolutely certain.  There are lots of little things in the book stemming from decisions which made sense at the time but don’t anymore – when I started the book I was still feeling out a lot of the details of how the magic and the world worked, and it’s only now that I’ve got a clear handle on them.

Now that I’m getting into it, what this most feels like is the big rewrite I did of the first Alex Verus novel, Fated, more than ten years ago.  Still, there are differences.  When I rewrote Fated, a lot of the Alex Verus setting was still quite vague and undefined – I had a good idea of how the magic worked (since by that point I’d been developing and evolving it through four precursor novels) but the world itself was still very blurry and the long-term plot was nonexistent.  For this series, I’ve got a much clearer idea of what the larger story will be – I’ve got books 2-3 sketched out in my head in a fair amount of detail, with plans for at least another 6 or so books after that.  The plans are still fairly smoky with a lot of room for change, but they’re much clearer in my mind than the shape of the Alex Verus series was at any point in the first few books.  I’m looking forward to getting there.

But that’s getting ahead of myself – right now, I have to finish this rewrite.  The deadline I’ve set for myself is mid-June.  If I hit it, and if my editors don’t ask for even more sweeping changes, then I should be able to give you guys a solid publication date once it’s done.  Fingers crossed!

For a while now, the main place for online discussion of the Alex Verus series has been the Alex Verus subreddit.  I occasionally get questions about why I don’t have a forum here on this website – the short answer is that growing/administering/moderating a forum community takes a lot of time and attention which I can’t easily spare, so I’ve been content to let this sort of thing develop naturally.  And over time, the Reddit sub has grown to fill the place a forum would.

However, there’s actually a second Reddit sub for my books – r/benedictjacka.  It was created by some guy who was trying to use it for advertising to drive traffic to various seedy money-generating sites.  Fortunately it never got much traction and the creator eventually got banned, so now with the subreddit being unoccupied, I’ve taken it over and one of the moderators from the main sub has cleaned it up.

I haven’t really decided what to do with the new subreddit as yet.  Now that the Alex Verus series is over and now that I’m starting work on a new series, the Alex Verus books are gradually going to become a smaller and smaller percentage of my total body of work.  So there’s some argument for trying to switch over for a site named after me rather than my books.  This’ll take a very long time though (decades), so there’s no hurry.

I also might just leave both subreddits up and see what happens.  I find it kind of fascinating to watch online communities grow on their own.

I’ve been spending the past month or so busy with plans for rewriting/rethinking my new series.  It’s been hard work, but interesting.

One thing that I’m doing differently with this series than I did with Alex Verus is to plan it out from the start in much more detail.  If you’ve been reading my author commentaries, you’ll know that Alex Verus wasn’t originally envisaged as a long-running series – in fact, back when I wrote the first draft of Fated, it wasn’t intended to be a series at all.  Cursed and Taken were also written as standalones first and series books second.  It was only around book 4 that I started to think seriously in terms of a long-term plot, it wasn’t until book 5 that I actually began to decide what that long-term plot would be, and that long-term plot didn’t really kick in until around book 7.

Having the series be mostly unplanned had both pluses and minuses.  On the positive side, it meant I was free to experiment and throw in weird new ideas from whatever I was interested in at the time.  A lot of the most popular elements of the books stemmed from random ideas that I came up with on the spur of the moment and just decided to toss in because they sounded fun.  It also meant that the series was free to evolve in surprising ways – none of the major storylines ended up where I’d been originally intending to take them, which I quite liked.

But it caused problems too.  Not all of the sub-plots in the Alex Verus series ended neatly – in quite a few cases I was forced to make a choice between having a plot go in the direction that would make for a neater and more coherent story, and having it go in the direction that was more consistent with what I’d established about the characters and the world.  In the earlier books, I tended to pick the first option;  in later ones, once the world and characters were more developed, I was more likely to pick the second.  In both cases, it meant some readers got upset.  There was also the issue that, in the long term, not planning things in advance caused me a LOT of extra work.  I’d frequently run into blockages where I just didn’t know where to go next – if I was lucky, that meant a week or two of thinking and planning, whereas if I was unlucky it meant realising that I’d taken a book in the wrong direction and having to rewrite it completely.

So with this new series, I’m taking the opportunity to try something different:  I’m planning out early books (and possibly even the entire series) in advance as far as I can.  I’ve currently got roadmaps for the various threads of the story that stretch out several books into the future.  My hope is that by the time I finish the rewrite of Book 1, I’ll have a general plan and shape for the series as a whole.  I don’t know if I’ll manage it, but it’ll be fun to try!

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks developing a cosmology for my new setting, and figuring out how to tie it into the story.

Turns out this kind of thing is a lot of work.  With hindsight, maybe I should have done all this before writing the book, but honestly, I’m not even sure it would have made things any easier.

Some bad news for this week, though it does have a silver lining to it.

As regular readers know, I’ve been working on a new urban fantasy series as of last summer, and I finished the first draft of Book 1 at the end of January.  Since then I’ve been talking it over with my beta readers and thinking about what edits I’d like to make and where I’d like the series to go.

Unfortunately, the longer I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realise that I’m not really happy with the book in its current state.  There are several reasons for this:

1) The series was originally conceived as an urban fantasy story with some progression fantasy elements.  It’s also much more human-centric than the Alex Verus series – in the first draft there are no magical or supernatural creatures at all.  While this has made the series more coherent and grounded than the Alex Verus books, it’s also meant that it’s much more “materialist” than most of my books have tended to be – much of the story has ended up revolving around money and power, and now that I look at the whole thing, I’m just kind of dissatisfied.  It doesn’t feel magical enough.

2) While I’ve developed a lot of the new world and setting in detail, creating a new urban fantasy setting is a huge job and a lot of stuff necessarily got left out.  In particular, a lot of the story elements in Book 1 are started but not finished – they’re not really developed, partly because I haven’t figured out where they’re going to go yet.  I did this a lot in the Alex Verus series, too, but I’m not sure it’s working well enough this time.  Several of my beta readers commented that the first book felt incomplete/unsatisfying (there aren’t resolutions to about 2 out of 3 of the main conflicts) and that’s not the feeling I want my readers to be walking away with after reading book 1 of what’s supposed to be a long-running series.

It’s a bit frustrating because I’ve been working really hard on this book for a really long time and I’ve now got it in a state where it’s finished and I’d really like for it to be done.  I’ve already got contract offers from my US and UK publishers for the first few books of the series and I could pretty much decide to sign those right now and have book 1 out in 12 months or so (if I seriously wanted to speed things up, I could self-publish it instead and have it out in a fraction of that time).  Unfortunately I think that if I do that, the result just won’t be good enough.  I’m sure lots of people will buy book 1 based on their good opinions of the Alex Verus series, but I don’t just want people to read it because they liked Alex Verus.  I want people to read it because they liked Alex Verus, then go on to like this series just as much.  And in the book’s current state, I’m not confident that that’ll happen.

So I’m going to go back to the drawing board and do a rewrite.  I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I’m expecting that it’ll be months.  (This means that the Alex Verus short story that I had been hoping to do in February isn’t happening any time soon, unless I get so sick of the rewrite that I decide to take a break and do something completely different for a few weeks.)

On the positive side, I’m sure that the book’s going to be much better by the time that I’m done.  Another side effect that I suspect my readers won’t mind is that with the new plans that I’m drawing up, the series is likely to be longer.  My initial plan for the series was that it would be quite a bit shorter than Alex Verus – the world was much ‘smaller’ and there wasn’t as long a journey for the main character to go on or as much to do.  With the new plans that I’m working on, the stakes are going to be a lot higher and there’ll be a lot more room for more important things to happen.

So that’s where things are at the moment!  I’ll give you more news once I have it, but for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be fully absorbed in rethinking/reworking the foundations of my new setting.

And we’re done!  I finished the first book of my new series earlier this week.

One thing that I’ve always found a little amusing about my writing is the way in which I just barely hit deadlines.  It didn’t happen every time with the Alex Verus series, but I did finish several of the books the exact day before my contract said that I was due to send them in, to the point where I started thinking that it probably wasn’t a coincidence.  In the case of this book, the personal deadline I set for myself was “end of January”, and I finished the last sentence of the last chapter at 11:53pm on January 31st.  I think I have some weird mental thing where my mind subconsciously calculates how much time I’ll need and spends every bit of its “budget”.

Writing this book has been a very strange feeling.  I wrote the first draft of the Alex Verus book, Fated, in 2008.  Since then, my writing career has involved the Alex Verus series and nothing else, meaning that this is the first time in 13 to 14 years (depending how you count it) that I’ve written a novel that wasn’t an Alex Verus one.  I did actually wonder while I was getting ready to start whether I’d even be able to do it at all (I was worried that I might have gotten so used to writing a divination mage that I’d forgotten how to write any other way), but as it turned out, it went just fine – putting myself into the shoes of a different protagonist felt very natural.

This book’s definitely been harder work than usual, though.  I wrote about my decision to start a new series a few months ago, and one of the points from there that I’ve been reminded of a lot is that a new series means starting from scratch.  When you’re a few books into a series, you have a lot of background, setting detail, and (most of all) characters that you can draw on.  For a new series, you have to make up EVERYTHING – it’s been a long time since I’ve done this, and the last few months have reminded me of just how much work it is.  Still, it’s done now!

The next stage is going to be dealing with my publishers – unlike the Alex Verus books, this novel is un-contracted for, and in publication limbo.  I think I should have something agreed reasonably soon, though.  As soon as I have a publication date, I’ll let you guys know.

Busy with the final scenes of the new book.  I’ve been working on this one pretty obsessively for the past few weeks now, and I’ll be very glad when it’s done.

Word count’s at a bit over my usual 90,000, but (as often happens these days) the book’s turning out to be a little longer than expected.  I’ll write a proper update once I’m finally there.