Hi,
The previous post was about the next few novels or novel series I intend to work on this year and for several years after that. My main focus at the moment is on trying to finish my novella, Flood and Fire, but it hasn’t been as easy as I originally hoped it would be. Flood and Fire — I’m assuming you know by now — is a prequel to my thriller, The Jagged Man, but why am I writing it to begin with?
When I published the original version of Jagged Man (in 2015), it had an ending that allowed for the possibility of the story continuing in more novels, even though I wasn’t sure then if I wanted to do that since it worked perfectly well as a standalone novel. Before I started writing Jagged Man, I had also finished the first draft of another novel, If a Butterfly, and intended to publish it next. Butterfly was going to be a single, very long, novel.
To abbreviate the rest of the story: In late 2016, I set Butterfly’s edits aside to do research for my brother’s legal cases. The research I did for him ended up being the basis for a non-fiction book, Aggravated, which I published in 2020. A year later (December, 2021) I published what became the two novels of the If a Butterfly series (Chrysalis and Emergence), and then spent most of 2022 implementing a very time-consuming e-mail advertising campaign for both books. I’ll explain that campaign in the next post.
My marketing for Butterfly was rather haphazard and way too time-consuming, so I intend to try something different when I republish Jagged Man. One of the things I did with Butterfly was to start a mailing list, using a reader magnet, and I plan to do that again with Jagged Man, hopefully with more success. A reader magnet is something an author gives away to get people to subscribe to their mailing list. The mailing list’s newsletters will then keep them informed of the author’s progress and (hopefully) get them excited about buying the book when it’s published.
When Butterfly was in its final edits, nearly ready to publish, I paused long enough to create a companion book for the series, and gave away an ebook of it as my reader magnet. It gave my potential readers a lot of background information about the Monarch migration, maps, character sketches, and illustrated recipes (a few of the characters eat a lot of yummy food during the story).
After the first version of Jagged Man was published, I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue telling that story in a forward direction, but my wife, Minay, suggested I write prequels featuring the Jagged Man because he’s an interesting, complex character who had been causing trouble for many centuries (so there were a lot of historical incidents I could base the stories on). Partway through the (very lengthy) email campaign for Butterfly, I agreed that it sounded like a good idea, so (after some thought) I started re-reading Samuel Pepys’ diaries about the 1666 Great Fire of London, and doing some brainstorming about possible characters and plots that could use my Jagged Man character as someone who could start the fire, and then spread fear about it among London’s 17th century residents.
So, why is it taking me so long to write a book (Flood and Fire) that should be even shorter than a novel. Novellas are typically between 30,000 and 50,000 words, novels are at least 50,000 words, sometimes a lot more. The 2015 version of Jagged Man is about 110,000 words. The new version will be a bit shorter. Flood and Fire is currently about 44,000 words, and it looks like I will need to add 5,000 or 6,000 more to reach a satisfying conclusion (one that will lead directly into Jagged Man), but the final editing and trimming will probably reduce it by 6,000 words or so (10% in a final edit and trim isn’t unusual).
Aside from all of the medical and household interruptions I have had over the past few years, I think my big stumbling block against completing Flood and Fire has been the historical nature of the Great Fire. It was so thoroughly documented, and I used historical characters in it who did a great deal of eyewitness documentation (primarily the diarists, Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and William Taswell). Because of the restrictions of their narratives I’ve had great difficulty keeping the storyline straight between all three of them, the other historical figures, plus my Jagged Man antagonist (who is using the name Stephen Peidloe in the novella).
I didn’t want to be inaccurate, so for a while I found myself often veering away from the actual writing to study one or more of the diaries to see what the diarist said about that day. I needed to do that so I could have each character in the right place at the right time (because two of them (Pepys and Evelyn) interact with each other, and two of them (Pepys and Taswell) interact with Peidloe.
Yes, if I had any hair on my head I would have been pulling it out frequently. 😊
Anyway, I’ve sorted most of my biggest problems by taking the time to create a scene by scene record of where each of them were, and when they were there. That helps. I still hope to have the novella completed this spring (I know I’ve said that before), and be reworking Jagged Man soon after that.
The next post will be about how I conducted the successful/unsuccessful campaign for If a Butterfly (and what I wish I had done instead).
See you then.
Michael
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