Benedict Jacka

The way I write has changed a lot over the years.

When I was writing my first novel, I was pretty chaotic.  I’d start at odd times and for odd durations and it’d be a complete toss-up whether I would or wouldn’t go back to the book in any given week.  Often I’d go for days or even weeks without making any progress.  Of course, a lot of that was because I didn’t really know what I was progressing to:  it took me fifty thousand words before I even figured out that I was writing a book in the first place.

My second and third books went more smoothly (which is is usually the way).  Still, I wasn’t particularly organised about it – writing wasn’t my job, just something I juggled in between all the other things I was doing in my Gap Year and at university.  After I graduated I started experimenting with different writing methods, some of which worked well and some of which worked . . . less well.  I went through a phase where I’d work from 12 to 3, AM and PM – as in, 12 noon to 3 in the afternoon, then again from midnight to 3 AM.  The fastest I’ve ever written a book was during this period – I finished a young adult novel in a little over two months.  On the other hand, to get that kind of speed I had to make some major trade-offs, and the schedule didn’t do my social life any favours, either.

It wasn’t until Taken that I started trying out a more methodical way of working (not coincidentally, this was around the point I shifted over to writing full-time).  I calculated how long I had until my deadline was up, then worked backwards to figure out how fast I’d have to write to make it.  As things turned out, I didn’t make the deadline, partly because my law finals happened to arrive just a little while before the book was due, and partly because while my arithmetic on the timing had been right, I hadn’t budgeted for any unexpected delays.  The manuscript was a couple of months late – not uncommon in the literary world, but it annoyed me all the same.

When I started Chosen, I took the lessons I’d learned and worked out a schedule.  I knew I had six months to write the book, and I also knew from past experience that my Alex Verus novels were averaging around the 90,000 word mark.  90,000 divided by six is 15,000, and 15,000 words a month comes out to 500 a day.  So, if I wrote 500 words a day for six months, that would equal one book – I just needed to make sure that when the inevitable delays happened, I’d do more on following days to make up for it. It didn’t turn out quite that neatly in practice (it never does) but it worked more than it failed, and I finished Chosen and sent it off to my publishers a few hours before the deadline.

I knew then that it was possible – to set a routine, and keep to it and compensate for any delays well enough to aim for a deadline months away and hit it.  I did the same thing with Hidden, and the same thing happened – I finished the manuscript almost exactly six months from starting it.  And that was how I started Alex Verus #6, and so far it’s working this time, too.

It’s become a routine, now.  I have the fonts and page settings on my word processing program calibrated to around 500 words a page, which means that instead of doing a word count I just need to finish each day’s writing one page on from yesterday.  Sometimes I get ahead of schedule, sometimes I get behind, but the fixed routine gives my day a level of structure that I otherwise wouldn’t have.  Maybe some day I’ll change it once again, but it’s working pretty well for now.  🙂

Proof copies of Hidden have arrived!  I usually try to give the proofs of my books a read-over, but this time I doubt I’ll be able to – the new book’s taking up all my work time. Still, everything’s on schedule and Hidden ought to be coming out in September (or whenever it’s released) with no more issues.  I’m looking forward to it, since I want to see how people react when they find out what happens!

In the meantime, I’m working away on Alex Verus #6 (which still doesn’t have a title).  The story’s shaping up to be fairly different from the previous ones, enough so that it’s been tricky to write – I wasn’t able to structure it out in advance, so I’ve had to spend my planning time each week working out what I’m going to be writing the next week.  On the plus side, the story’s going fairly well, and those who’ve read it so far seem to be happy with it.  I still don’t know how it’s going to end, though I’m getting a good idea of what the state of play will be by that point.

In terms of pace I’m on schedule, but only just.  The manuscript’s at 40,000 words so far, my average length for an Alex Verus novel is around 90,000 words give-or-take, and my deadline is the end of June, so assuming I can keep up this pace I’ll finish at the deadline almost exactly.  Now I just have to hope that this one won’t require a rewrite of the same length that Hidden did . . .

As of this week, we’ve just passed the two-year mark for the release of Fated!  Last year I did a ‘First Anniversary’ post, where I looked back on everything that had happened since Fated’s publication.  Now it’s the second anniversary instead of the first – what’s happened since then?

In a lot of ways my second year of being a published (non-children’s) writer has been less eventful than the first.  In 2012, I had three books come out at three-month intervals – Fated, Cursed, Taken.  It would be nice to be able to keep releasing books at that pace, but unfortunately I write MUCH slower than that – the only reason Orbit and Ace were able to publish so many of my books so fast in 2012 was that I had Fated and Cursed written and edited well before 2012 arrived.  In 2013, I had only one book published, Chosen.

One book a year is, unfortunately, a lot closer to my actual writing rate, as borne out by this year’s work – the main writing I did in 2013 was Book #5 of the Alex Verus series, Hidden.  That said, I’m hoping to go a little bit faster than that in future.  Hidden wound up taking twelve months total – three months planning, six months writing, and another three months editing and rewriting until I got something me and my editors were all happy with.  For book #6, I’m shooting for nine months rather than twelve, and I’ve got a deadline to motivate me – the first draft of book #6 is due in by the end of June.

On that topic, the big news for this last year for me has been the contract for books #6 and #7 of the Alex Verus series.  It’s always a huge relief as an author when deals like this get settled – no matter how well sales seem to be going, you’re never quite sure how the publishers see it.  Now that the contracts are done and signed, there are going to be Alex Verus books coming out all the way into 2016, which feels weird to write (very far ahead, isn’t it?) but which is good.  Means I can focus on the writing without having to worry about the series being suddenly cut off!

The second piece of news publishing-wise for 2013 was the release of the Tantor audiobooks for the Alex Verus series.  I’ve been getting “when are the audiobooks coming out?” questions for what feels like forever, so it was nice to be able to finally answer that with a positive.  There are some tentative plans for UK audiobooks in the works, too, but nothing definite yet – I’ll post when I have more news.

So while there hasn’t been a huge amount of news for the past year, there’s still been a fair bit, and all of the news has been good.  The Alex Verus novels are still going and still selling, the work on writing more of them is going well, and my publishers are happy enough with them that they’re contracting for more.  Enough to give me reason to be optimistic about the next year!

Had been planning to do an Ask Luna column for today, but got distracted – the current book’s going slower than usual and it’s taking up all of my time.

I hit these blocks from time to time.  Usually it happens either when I haven’t planned out the story in enough detail, and need to stop and work it out, or when I have planned out the story in detail and realise that it needs changing.  (The second one’s much worse.  This delay is the first kind, luckily.)

It’s not really an emergency though – it’s happened before, it’ll happen again, and I’ve gone through it enough times to be used to it (and I doubt it’ll stop me hitting my deadline).  Still tends to make it hard to focus on anything else, though!

And fourth and last of the set, Chosen is out in audio format this coming Monday!  As with the previous set, it’s published by Tantor, and you can listen to a sample on their website.

(Yes, it’s still US-only.  No, I don’t know when the UK audio books will be coming out.  I’ll post it up here as soon as I have any news, I promise.)

In other news, Hidden is all edited and sent off for proofing.  I’ll probably do a preview post on it some time in the next month or two.  Meanwhile, I’m busy on Alex Verus #6 – three chapters in at the moment, and it’s going well so far!

The US cover for Alex Verus #5, Hidden, is finished!  Here it is:

They definitely seem to be doing a colours-of-the-rainbow theme with the US covers.  I suggested green for this one (given which character the book focuses on, it seemed appropriate) but I guess they preferred red.  We’ve already had orange, purple, blue, and yellow, so I’m assuming green’ll be the colour for number 6 . . . or maybe indigo, or pink, or whichever the seventh colour of the rainbow is.  I’ve got a feeling it’s pink, but I’m not sure they’d want to use that!

I’m just finishing up the copyedits on Hidden this week.  Once they’re done it’ll go in for proofreading, and it should be released this September in both the US and UK.  Amazon have the UK release date as 2nd September, but I’ve no idea if that’s accurate or not.  I’ll post here when I have a release date confirmed.