It’s been a week since I’ve finished writing the second draft of my horror thriller novel. The day it happened, I didn’t realize it had actually happened. I have been writing this draft of the novel for six months now and have gotten into the grove of always working on this book no matter what is going on. I’ve written on planes, in cars, while waiting for the vet, while cooking. I’ve gotten up at 5 AM each morning to make sure I am at my desk writing by 6 AM so I can get a couple of hours in before the rest of my day starts.
During the final 2 week stretch of drafting the novel, I went further and committed to full writing days of 5-8 hours of writing. I did writing crawls where I hopped around my town writing for a couple hours in different places to keep my momentum and energy going. As my 2nd term teacher, Taymour, said, “You must submit to the novel.”
And submit I did.
During my weekly journaling sessions around writing and the story, the day before I finished the draft, I wrote that my character told me this story does not have an end. It will keep going even after I finish writing it. The end I have written is not the end. The ending I will write on the final draft will be an ending of footsteps walking away. It will not be a goodbye but an I gotta go.
This is the hardest novel I have ever written. It is the longest novel I have ever written. It’s 178,776 words, which translates to 578 pages. Almost 100,000 more words than I planned on the novel being and way longer than what I want the final draft word count to be.
My novel writing process, typically, happens over the span of a year, maybe a year in a half. I spend a few days coming up with the idea, a few months researching the idea and world, building characters, and crafting an outline. Then I write the novel over the span of a few weeks or a couple of months. I will often spend a month minimum away from the project before going back for months of revisions which often includes doing a full rewrite of the draft. Once the novel has been rewritten and edited over the course of a year or year in a half, I start querying and submitting it to agents and places. I’ll leave a novel out on query for as long as it takes before retiring it. Right now with this project, I have already done the research, outlining, character sketches, finished the first and second draft.
Over the past 8 or 9 years, I’ve written 4 novels, this one being the 4th. After years of really encouraging rejections and agent connects, I took a step back and wanted to approach my next book totally different. I wanted the next book I queried to be the one that lands me an agent. So in 2021 or so, I came up with a new novel idea after a cross country train trip put me face to face with the Nevada desert.
I was sand struck and taken away entirely into a new place and world. Unlike before, instead of rushing through to get the story out, I told myself to take my time. Instead of spending a few months outlining and researching, spend a year minimum doing that. I spent about 3 years doing that, developing my idea, researching, building out an outline that was the size of a book (30,000 words). Then I spent time during grad school deepening my work around the novel and writing the first draft, following the research and outline I had made.
The first draft was good and much more straightforward, but it did not feel alive in the way I wanted it, too. That meant during my second draft and full rewrite, I would have to write in a new way and think about story in a new way. Instead of following my outline or research, I trusted that I knew the characters, world, and story enough to simply let my characters loose for me to follow. It took a lot of work to let myself just listen and write. It also added way more words to my book than I intended. I set out to do a 90k second draft and ended up with a 179,000 word draft.
But so it goes when you’re allowing yourself to be less of a writer and more of a storyteller. I could have told my characters to shut up and get in the car, but I didnt, I allowed them to break into my loft in the middle of the night, to smile brightly at me and lead me into the dark, where I knew horrors awaited.
It finally hit me that I was done with the drafting after a week of not writing on it. And I’m not just done but that huge chunk of each day I dedicated to writing the book is now freed up for other projects. In a couple of months, that space is going to be taken up by my next book project which is much more tame and straightforward. Less serious and talent/skill stretching. It’s a cozy horror set in a small Washington town. Until then, I’m using my two hours in the morning as a space to work on my class materials for some upcoming classes and to draft articles and assignments for magazines.
While the novel I just finished won’t be ready for querying or submitting until 2027 at the earliest, here is where you can catch some of my work in the upcoming months:
- I’ve built a writing app, Scene Builder, to help people analyze their story’s scenes and think about the movement of their short story, novelette, novella, or novel. It is in beta test mode now and available for people to sign up.
- I’m teaching a class on writing and manipulating the atmosphere in fiction with HerStory. You can sign up for that class on the Herstory website. If you’d like to get a better handle on the different layers or atmosphere and how to make your readers feel your story, this is the class for you.
- I also pitched an article to Lit Hub that they picked up on the routines of different artists and what writers can learn from them. I don’t have a pub date for that yet, but I will share it once I have it.
- I’ll be swinging by A Meal of Thorns Podcast to talk Ray Bradbury’s early crime writing and its impact on his later work. I don’t have a pub date (maybe sometime in the summer). Once I do have the link and air date, I’ll share it.
And in the coming weeks, I’ll be querying my short story collection, How I Creak for You and Other Stories You Don’t Want Me to Tell, which is a collection of my published and unpublished horror and dark fantasy stories centered around United States trauma and mythos. My list of agents who accept short story collections and also rep the other genres I write in is small and short story collections are notoriously hard to place with an agent, so I should know by the winter whether that collection gets picked up. If it doesn’t, there are several short story collection contests and open submission periods that I’ll send it out to next year.
I’m also waiting to hear back from some artist residencies I applied to at the beginning of the year: Hedgebrook, Jentel, Convenant, and VCCA. I’ll be applying to UCross in May once the applications open. My plan is, if I land any of these residencies, to spend the time while there working on revisions.
My teacher described finishing a novel as having wind at your back. The wind I feel is from a car going fast around a bend filled with giggling women and the dead.
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Aigner Loren Wilson 