Checking In at Tobias Buckell Online

Journal Entry

Checking In

July 24th 2006 at 6:29 pm

I’m still alive! Heh, I’m about 60% of the way through the novel, not quite as far along as I’d hoped, but I’m incredibly pleased with the rewriting I’ve done. I think this book is going to be a lot of fun.

Realized after getting an email from a worried reader I should clarify something. The deadline I’m under was completely my own fault, not my publisher’s or my editor’s!

I had roughly 2 years to write Ragamuffin. It’s typical of me to learn things by screwing up, but I’ve found one thing I can’t do is workshop a partial novel. I did that with Ragamuffin, and while everyone who commented was brilliant, and had great things to point out, my desire to write the book got quenched by the bewildering array of cool possibilities they suggested. That delayed the writing. I won’t ever do that again.

The second thing that occurred was that I was that the university I worked at had a professor resign on short notice due to a scandal of some sort, so I agreed on a one week notice to teach 2 technology classes for fall semester. That took way more mental space than I anticipated with all the other stuff I was doing, the novel suffered.

That meant by the time I turned in the novel it was 6 months later than when I’d promised.

The thing about this being my second novel ever attempted is that it means I’m learning in public (read along kidddies, watch me do everything wrong and learn from the guy who runs into the brick walls! and you get to watch me slip up. You’ve been watching a mess of my own making.

Both my editor and I want Ragamuffin to be a great book. I think that if I turn in something that isn’t satisfactory, I’ll probably just see Ragamuffin coming out later than the expected summer ‘07 date as I’m sent back to work on it, though everyone would really like me to make that publication date because that is the date the paperback of Crystal Rain comes out, so it means people who read Crystal Rain in paperback can get immediate gratification with Ragamuffin!

Anyway, I thought that was worth clarifying, lest everyone think I’m being stood over with a whip and someone screaming ‘deadline deadline deadline’ over me and confirming their worst fears about publication. The only reason I stress about this is that I hate letting people down, and I know what an incredible opportunity having both Ragamuffin and Crystal Rain on the shelves will be for my career, something that I’d, you know, like to have.

Certainly, I’ve learned that I will never workshop a partial manuscript, my writing style doesn’t match up well with it.

I’m also determined never to slight my writing again. I shouldn’t have taken the safe route and thrown myself into teaching those classes to please people who have no vested interest in my success. Slighting my dreams for a paycheck or what I thought was stable and safe was a compromise that I’m paying for right now, and that’s been a huge life lesson for me.

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4 Responses so far

1. Jim on Jul 25th, 2006 at 6:31 am

I know what you mean about learning in public. There are things I’m still figuring out how to do, which I basically bypassed in the first goblin books. There’s a wee bit more pressure when editors are actually expecting and waiting to see the next project.
2. Mark Terry on Jul 25th, 2006 at 7:27 am

I like your comments about “workshopping” a novel. I learned a while back not to talk about works in progress. I sometimes blog about a work in progress, but more after-the-fact, a “see, I had this problem, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it, so I tried this and this and the other things, and here’s how I decided to fix it and why.”

And I’m pondering your last paragraph there. My writing career balances on some version of a knife edge. I’ve got a four-book contract (the last 2 books recently signed, the first book to come out in October) and my agent is shopping something else around under a pen name. I make a living–and a pretty decent one–writing nonfiction. I got a huge nonfiction business market report I’m in the middle of and I’ll probably be able to do these types of things as long as I want to (unless I screw this up), and it’s lucrative, but man, does it suck up the time and energy. Maybe it should, since it pays so well, but there’s a part of my brain that says, “Until this point you’ve had a lot of fun with this writing career, and this is a pain in the ass. You sure you want to go down this road?”

Life is compromise, I guess.
3. Steve Buchheit on Jul 25th, 2006 at 8:03 am

Good to know you’re still alive.

Keep learning in public. There are enough brick walls to go around. My brick walls may not be your brick walls. It’s comforting to hear as you go through the darkened room a thump and someone else call out, “wall.” That way you know others are doing the same thing, and eventually you learn most of the walls and know where to step.

I’ve also learned the lesson about the day job (and the night job) slighting the writing time. I just haven’t been able to follow it, yet. So mostly I now notice when it happens and grind my teeth harder. I have also noticed that when I’m either “not in the mood,” don’t have a writing deadline (self imposed), or a brand in the fire, the other jobs don’t press as hard at those times. I once thought it was a matter of perspective, but after five years and different jobs, there is some correlation. I’ve also learned to write, or at least edit, when there is no mood. Then I read when I’m too tired to focus on writing. I’ve made the commitment that I either have to write or read everyday. Most nights I do both.
4. Robert J. Sawyer on Jul 28th, 2006 at 4:31 pm

Hee hee hee. You learn a lot faster than I do! It took me seventeen novels to learn to turn down teaching assignments … I just turned down an offer from the University of Toronto for next summer, so I could spend the time writing instead. Good on you, Toby!

Cheers,

Rob

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