This is probably my second-favourite Killers song. And they didn’t play it last week but the gig was great (though Mr Brightside started with a weird bit from a remix). I’d definitely see them again, hopefully they’ll tour again soon and I can see them again. Nothing wrong with massive stadium rock as long as it’s good massive stadium rock.
Last week
Work-wise, it was a case of head down with FOLLOW THE LEADER. Taking a bit longer with it than usual, but that's cool. 17k last week, but it’s solid stuff. A lot of emotional stuff going down with the book, so I want to capture that well. Only problem is I’ve still got about 1/3 of it left to do. Hopefully they’ll turn out to be short chapters as there have been some absolute whoppers so far.
I got editorial notes back from the sci-fi thing. There’s not much to disagree with but a lot of work to do with it. The physics all reads plausibly, which is the bit I was most worried about, but there’s more scope that can be wrung out of the character situation. I'm letting it all tap away at the back of my brain while I work on finishing this, trying to see where I can take the characters in a satisfying way. It’s going to have a big emotional crunch at the end and will hopefully get all those TikTok kids crying their eyes out at the end (yeah, right). (No, really.)
If you’re on my main mailing list, I sent out a deleted chapter from LOST CAUSE. It’s the prologue to the book, but I shifted that action later in the story so it didn’t fit any more and so I cut it out. If you want to read it, well check your spam folder! Or let me know.
This week
It’ll be a tough one, lots on. Trying to get somewhere reasonably close to the end of the first draft FOLLOW THE LEADER, but we shall see if that's possible. There’s a fair amount of stuff for me to fix before I can do a full readthrough, but nothing major yet. Twenty chapters left, but I only did 13 last week. Maybe I’ll finish it, maybe I won’t, but I’m going to NOT RUSH IT, like I usually do. Make sure the ending works.
(I hated writing a few of the middle Fenchurch books, 4 and 5 definitely, because I always got into trouble with the endings. Book 2 was the worst by a country mile, but those ones felt like I was swimming against a tide of treacle. The whole ending had to be flipped around between edits. Ouch. And they were written to hard deadlines, so everything was that little bit more pressurised, at least in my head.)
Actually, one of the biggest writing tips I can give. Sod outlining vs making it up, fixing forward is much more important.
Imagine the situation where you’re writing a chapter and you realise there’s something wrong with some earlier stuff. Like a character’s background or her car or you should move a chunk of one chapter into another. Instead of stopping writing the current scene to go back fix all the old stuff, make a note. Whether it’s as a comment in the document, in your todo app, on the back of an old envelope, it doesn’t matter – whatever works for you. Treat the rest of the book as though you’d made the change.
Going back through later to fix all of these issues is a good exercise. Some might cancel each other out, but some tend to combine to solve one big problem. It’s weird how it works, but like Steve Jobs said, creativity is just connecting things in a cool way. (Or something like that.)
Obviously, if your Spidey-sense is tingling that there’s something big to change, then you should probably stop and take stock then. Ideally making the change. Always remember that the objective with the fix-forward idea is to stop yourself slowing down writing the stuff you haven’t written yet, so if you're going to struggle writing that because there’s a massive plot hole, fix it first. That make sense? I hope so.
Anyway, hope you have a cracking week.
Cheers,
Ed