TandeWrites

This year, I am going to write a book.

A book in a year doesn’t sound like a hugely impressive achievement or goal, especially when we exist in an era of NaNoWriMo where you write a book in a month, or people on TikTok who write books in three days. As someone who is a notoriously slow writer (it took me five years on and off to write both of my books so far) I think a book in a year is, you know, a stretch for me.

I say ‘a book’. I’m sticking in the fifty to sixty thousand word count as my books tend to be on the shorter side which works out to be around 160 words per day, which when you view it like that is very attainable. Very attainable for me whose paragraphs are sometimes 160 words long ‘cause I love to monologue, I love to yap.

The book I’m working on is currently affectionately referred to as ‘Best Friend WIP’. A version of the idea has been floating around since 2014, originally called ‘Heart’, and it was about a blind boy and a deaf girl who meet in group therapy and are forced to become friends through a letter-writing task, and they learn to navigate their disabilities in a way where they can fit neatly into each other’s lives. This is definitely partially inspired by ‘The Fault in Our Stars’, and I don’t think I need to elaborate on that much further.

In around 2018, there was another idea I was tentatively working on that had the lovely ridiculously long title ‘The Improbable Probability of Changing the World Tonight’ (which I’m still very fond of) and it was about two best friends, one of which has decided they are going to end their life and the other one decided to give this person the best however long they have left they can imagine.

And these are two ideas that in theory are very similar, but I didn’t have either of them developed in any way with a functional plot, so I wondered what it would look like if I merged them together into one Franken-idea. I’ve been thinking about this until this year when I finally decided to commit to the challenge and that this is going to be my next book. I love this idea. I think about it constantly. We’re gonna make it work.

I’d currently describe it as Alice Oseman, but in a ‘Radio Silence’ / ‘Solitaire’ kind of way, and John Green, but in a ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ kind of way. This book is a queer young adult contemporary. It’s about the complexities of disabilities, discovering the wrong ways to be not okay, and how platonic soulmates can change your world overnight. It definitely emphasises platonic soulmates. It’s about asexuality, disability, mental illness, and how when you think your world is ending, that is not necessarily true.

In terms of writing progress, we’re currently in May, but I’m going to talk about the past four months and how that’s been for me.

January through March was spent merging these two ideas together. There were about twelve thousand words from one idea already written and around eight thousand from the other, so I had twenty thousand words that I had to try and make work. In January I worked on 12,500 words, February was 4,000, and March was around 2,000. I sat there at the end of March with 18,985 words and I thought that there was something good in there. It’s where the actual form of the plot started brewing, I could work on an outline, and the characters started to make sense. As someone who usually loves to edit as I go, I knew that wasn’t going to work for this project because I could start editing and then get to something that I wrote five years ago and cause an infinite amount of continuity errors and create even more work for myself. So I got to April and I thought, you know, I’ve written out all the words I have so far, I’m gonna edit it in chunks. So I set myself a goal of going back in April, August, and December to edit everything I’ve written so far.

In April, I added another 1,500 words just through editing, and this is where I really was able to craft the voice I wanted for the book. I knew I wanted it to be slightly humorous, slightly conversational, very British, and again very teenage, because it’s a book about seventeen-year-old characters, and I was around seventeen when I started writing it. I also tend to joke that everything I ever write is about the horror of being seventeen and that very much applies to this book.

At this point, now that I have 20,000 words which is around 40% of this book completed, I think I want a beta reader who can tell me if what I’m working on is good or intriguing or even just working so far. I wrote my first book ‘Beauty in the Breakdown’ and my second one ‘Paper Forests’ largely on Movellas which is a ‘fanfiction’ website where you upload it chapter by chapter and people can comment as you write, and I got at least one or two comments per new chapter. I’ve grown to love this chapter-by-chapter feedback, and as someone who loves fan service, I will go in and write exactly what my readers want.

My main struggle while writing the first 20,000 words of this book was realising that, sometimes, chapter five and chapter six don’t go next to each other. They used to, back in 2017, but now that ideas have been merged together, I know that there should be three chapters between them, and writing them occasionally feels like pulling teeth.

It’s a project that I find challenging, I really love it, it makes my brain work properly, and I can’t wait for this book to be done. Because I have a cover for this book. I’ve been thinking about it for so long that I have designed the cover, I know exactly what the interior is gonna look like, and I think closer to my hypothetical release date I would love to make more content about the process of making books for indie authors. This will be an independently published book under my company Little Oaks Independent Publishing, and I would love to share what I have learned with you.

That’s all I’ve got to say about this book so far. I hope to say more about it soon ❤