Two steps forward, one step back

One of the problems with being an author is that a good deal of your labour is invisible. This little blog post here took maybe half an hour to write and edit, but you're going to read it in just a few minutes. You don't see the deep artistic struggle* that went into each word choice, each comma placement, each slaughtering of a darling. (*Poetic licence also.) Because you only see the finished product, it's easy to assume it just sprang into being as quickly as you've skimmed over it.

This isn't a criticism of you, or any other reader. I do the same thing myself when I'm reading other people, if maybe in a slightly more despairing way. I read a great novel and think, man, it's so unfair it comes so effortlessly to this person, when for all I know they're sobbing into their keyboard fourteen hours a day.

Anyway, I bring this up because I've been conscious the last few months that it has now been ten full years since I published What Ends, my first and so far only book, which is long enough that a lot of people have sheepishly stopped asking when the next one is coming — presumably because they think, after this long, that I'm not trying anymore.

So I thought I'd pull back the curtain a little and tell you about all the extensive authorial trying I have still been doing in the meantime.

My next big project after What Ends — maybe still the project I like the most — was a collection of linked short stories based on my day job at the time, an immigration paralegal in New York. It was twelve stories in total, each of which went through between five and ten drafts, and I maintain it was some of my strongest work. Five of them I published in literary journals, and a sixth got a personal rejection from the New Yorker, which is basically as good as being published. Everything was lining up to make a really compelling submission to publishers.

But my agent at the time, like most commercially minded people in the publishing industry, was dubious to begin with about the sales potential in a collection of short stories, and after Donald Trump got elected and brought in his travel ban, I reluctantly had to agree that the book needed to go back in the drawer. All of a sudden it seemed like a white guy writing literary fiction about obscure visas for scientists was not the writing about American immigration law that the world needed.

At the same time as working on the stories, though, I'd also been tinkering around with a new novel about the pharmaceutical industry, and so I shifted my focus to that, working through four drafts over a couple of years. (This was also around the time I had a baby, so it was slow going.) It was about a pharmaceutical company skirting FDA rules to push through a new drug (like the Sacklers), and that new drug was a revolutionary new weight-loss product that suppresses appetite by mimicking a particular molecule active in both the intestine and the brain (like Ozempic) — except this was before the Sacklers or Ozempic were headline news. Spookily, in fact, I wrote the book before Ozempic even existed, never mind being headline news — I was getting it ready to submit around the time Ozempic was in clinical trials.

Still, when my agent started shopping that draft around, despite some interest from a few publishers, it evidently seemed a bit too outlandish a setup. Besides, by this point we were coming up to the second Trump election campaign, and ultimately nobody wanted to take any risks with their list. So that one went in the drawer too — though I have since written another draft of it, in light of both the feedback I got from those first few editors, and the overwhelming public attention on the Sacklers and Ozempic the past few years.

Meanwhile, by now about five years post-What Ends, I started on a third book, this one a novel about the Edinburgh Fringe. I worked at the Fringe for thirteen years, and everyone always tells you to write what you know etc., so it seemed like a safe bet. Looking back, some of it was pretty good too, but by about halfway through the first draft it still wasn't clicking for me.

More to the point, I had a new job at this point, a ticketing analyst at a theatre marketing agency, and I was squeezing in my writing before I started there in the mornings, working in a Pret in the West End. Almost every week I would watch the staff kick out at least one homeless person trying to stay warm or take a nap, and I began to really struggle with the cognitive dissonance of it all: seeing the utter failure of society to protect its most vulnerable, all on the doorstep of these theatres who were paying my company thousands of pounds a year to work out how to charge people more for tickets to musicals.

So I changed tack again and started on a fourth book, this one a satire about a hit new musical whose defective marquee signage falls in a freak accident in its opening week, and kills a homeless person — and more to the point, about all the inevitably lopsided crisis management that ensues.

Much like Trump and the immigration book, however, the universe had different ideas, because around the time I was starting on the second draft of the theatre book, COVID arrived. And despite the fact that I now (in theory) had lots of extra time to write, it wasn't clear if or when theatres might ever reopen, or if they'd ever be the same, or if anything I'd written so far would make any kind of sense or have any kind of relevance. So into the now-overflowing drawer went that one too.

Instead — after probably a year-long hiatus during which I confess I wrote almost nothing at all and instead just tried to process lockdown — I picked up another novel idea I'd been noodling around with for a while. This one was a grim, locked room thriller, in which a father trapped at home with his young daughter falls down the stairs and breaks his neck, and has to work out, paralysed, how to get help. The first draft came pretty easily, but by the time I'd finished it, theatres had come back and it seemed clear that my theatre book would still work too.

So I've been alternating drafts of those last two ever since, along with, like I said above, returning to the pharmaceutical book. That might sound inefficient, but cycling through projects that way helps me come back to each one with fresher eyes. And hey, after ten years, it's not like I'm all that worried about hitting some arbitrary deadline anymore.

The point is, although it's been ten years since my first book was published, the fact that there hasn't been another since then doesn't mean I've just been sat around doing nothing. Alongside moving to another country, having a baby, buying an apartment, changing jobs (three times)... I've also written four-and-a-half other manuscripts, even if none of them are quite ready for primetime yet.

Hopefully, though, before too much longer, I'll be able to share one of them with the world. I've got a new agent, and he's excited about one of them in particular and getting it ready for submission. So watch this space.