Most of my recent posts have been about my new active lifestyle, but it’s not all been gym and cooking. I’ve also been working on my new novel.
My tidy filing system tells me I wrote the first draft of chapter one on the 10th of September 2017. It’s now one year and one month later and I’ve sent the completed text to my agent. That’s a submitted draft of 98,000 words.
People often ask how long does it take to write a book. It can take years, it can take months, but this particular novel I feel I wrote at a pretty good pace for the level of complexity and the other stuff I had going on. Looking at my journal, I think I’ve effectively written this part time. Most writers have a day job as well, and for the past year I was on sabbatical which gave me more time to write, but also to pursue some of the other goals I’ve been blogging about.
Another question people ask is “so when will it be published?”. Again, that depends on a number of factors. The next step is for my agent to read it and tell me what she thinks.
And, until that happens I can’t tell you very much about it. It’s a secret!
However, I do want to tell you something about it so here’s one way you can get into my head. While I was writing this I created a playlist of songs that cover some of the themes in the novel. It’s a high impact pop playlist so if you like that sort of music, you’ll like it. It has 27 songs right now and a run time of 1 hr 35 minutes and you can follow it on Spotify by clicking this link.
There is one song that isn’t like the others, but it’s an important inclusion. That’s the Baz Luhrmann song “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)“. (The link is to the original video on YouTube.) This song is a spoken word version of an essay “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune.
In 1997, I was 20 and I could really have used a lot of that advice then. Only the irony of the song is that you can’t actually use the advice, you have to learn it for yourself. My novel is about some of the same ideas and it’s intended for teenagers like me and like everyone else, trying to work out who you want to be when you grow up.
That’s all can say right now. Enjoy the playlist and look forward to some more updates and teasers as I use the time before I start the next book to do some more bloggery about it.