one chapter at a time

an experiment in momentum

It seemed like a good idea at the time, perhaps it was - still is. I decided to disrupt my highly-evolved procrastination strategies by writing a novel and posting it one chapter at a time on my main website page. It wasn’t a case of making it up as I went along, quite the opposite. I first created Jane And The Dragon as a picture book thirty eight years ago, and in the following decades I have mapped out her life story from birth to death. Twenty years ago I developed it as a TV series which covers Jane’s early years training to be a Knight of the King’s Guard. The series won a number of prestigious awards and was seen and loved by millions of children around the world. Those viewers are now adults, many with young children of their own, and I have been very blessed with a lovely bunch of truly genuine fans, not of me I should add, but of Jane.

I’ve been working on the storyline of a Jane And The Dragon novel for many years. I had all the story elements because over the past thirty years I have written a full timeline of Jane and her life in Kippernia. This post is for those fans, perhaps you are among them, and it is part explanation, part apology, for the time it is taking to finish this online novel you have been reading for some time now, as I’ve been drip feeding it to you chapter by chapter.

The whole thing began easily enough. My workload in my day job was under control, and I had my evenings and weekends free, mostly. So it was a good time to get the experiment underway. I set myself the target of uploading a new episode every two weeks, and gave myself a contingency buffer by finishing six chapters before I started. Enough of a buffer (or so I thought) should a sudden spike in workload or some health crises arise.

However, it quickly dawned on me that I had started down a road that was, from a creative process POV, a good 90% at odds with my normal approach. I am a polisher. I like to let a draft breath and marinate. That last sentence is a case in point. I might read that again in a week's time and deplore the use of such a mixed metaphor, or I might applaud myself and ramp it up a notch. A great writer once said that being an author was 90% about polishing, and I’ve realised that is true for me, but I have realised it too late for this novel which was baring its unpolished chapters for all the world to see.

I comforted myself that I was amongst friends, a community who were much more interested in Jane’s ongoing story than in the writing style, and that once I had finished the online experience, I would take the book down, and polish it before publishing it.

Then a second, more serious issue, arose. The storyline was designed to be the first part of a trilogy of three books, and I came to realise that I was ending book one in a way that was very unsatisfactory, and that I had to accept the simple truth that at my age, 72, I might not get around to writing the next two novels. So I started bringing elements of book two into book one so that there would be a complete narrative with no cliff hangers or loose threads.

Then a third issue arose. New readers, who know nothing about Jane, who have never seen the show or read the picture book, have found the online book, and while they are enjoying the story, they are confused at how little introduction I’ve given to many of the characters. I was appalled when I read back over my material to see how much I had assumed only fans familiar with the show would find and read the story.

So, a positive experiment? Yes, because it certainly stopped my procrastination. Now I ask for everyone who has read it for your continued forbearance. I am rewriting the book and putting in all the missing elements that need to be in there earlier now that it has extended to include much of what would have been book 2. I want this to be the best book it can be, a legacy book that tells Jane's story as it will almost certainly be the only Jane book now, and I want it to be a complete telling.

I'm putting in all the backstory about the return of the Druid, the reason he left, the Queen's growing unhappiness with Jane, Jester's tutelage under the Druid ( he barely advanced to a Bard - the first level of secret knowledge of the Celtic Druids). I had introduced the return of the Druid, but only in passing, and he's essential to the plot’s ending.

Here, I’m doing it again, aren't I? Those of you who haven't been reading the online novel are completely out of the loop on all this. Anyway, Gunther's story, Jester's story and Lavinia's story were all going to evolve and come to a conclusion in book 2; but now that I'm pulling all those stories into the one novel, I have to go back and entrench them. So it's going to be a large doorstopper of a book with Jane's mother's history, the Merchant and Gunther’s story more central, the Queen's desire to have the Norse gods celebrated on equal status as the Celtic gods, and so much more: all the timelines, alternative history of the world, Dragon’s discoveries about his past, etc etc, The novel will end with Jane setting off with Dragon and leaving her childhood and the castle behind.

Which means the ending can't be crunched up and rushed, so everyone who has been following the story, please be patient for a while longer and in return I will invite you all to an exclusive read of the finished book, for free of course, before it gets published and launched into the market.