It’s hard enough being an unpublished writer, struggling along with the rest of the teeming multitude, trying to get noticed, so why the heck do we make things harder for ourselves by perpetuating myths, misunderstandings and downright untruths about the process of being published?

Hang about in any writer’s community, be it online or in the real world, and sooner or later you will encounter a manifestation of this phenomenon. It happens with the inevitability of Godwin’s Law: just as every Internet argument will devolve into accusations of Nazism, so every place where unpublished writers gather together will throw up one of the following gems.

Editors are eeeevil

No, they’re not. They’re human beings, not the spawn of the pit. They are professional word-wranglers and it is their job to improve your work. They’re like Berocca for your book: it’s you on your best day, only better.

They’ll hack my work to pieces

No, they won’t.  Seriously, if it needs that much work, there’s little chance the publisher would have laid out money for it in the first place unless you’re a 21 year old celebrity with a sensational autobiography who can’t write worth a damn.

What an editor does is apply polish.  No matter how shiny you think your manuscript is, it’s a fact that we all make mistakes, or aren’t quite as clear as we could be. The editor will smooth out the sentence structure, weed out repetition or overwriting and then wrap it all up in house style. You should barely be able to see where they’ve been, but read the book afterwards and you’ll be amazed at your literary genius all over again.

But I’ve got no say over the changes they make

Wrong again. Your editor will send you a copy of your manuscript with all the changes in it, and you get to approve pretty much every comma, deletion and rewording they’ve done.

The editor will have a damn good reason for every change they make. Maybe what you wrote was ungrammatical, repetitious or inane. Maybe it was a poor analogy, or you’re overusing a word.  People do stuff like nod and shrug all the time, for instance, but in books nods and shrugs are, to quote my editor, “heinously overused”.

So it follows that if you want to alter something the editor has done, you must justify it. If your justification is good, you’ll probably get your way, but you’ll have to give a little to get a little. You can’t just snap and snarl like a terrier with a chew-toy it doesn’t want to give up, clicking “Reject change” on everything, and expect to be taken seriously.  That is the mark of an amateur, or the kind of pain-in-the-ass author that nobody wants to work with. Get over yourself and start acting like a professional.

Belief in your ability to write is essential in this business, but you also need a healthy dose of humility. Nobody’s prose is so golden that it is beyond improvement. Nobody’s – not even God’s (read the Bible and you’ll see what I mean; if He’d had a decent copy-editor there wouldn’t be all those long lists of begats in the Old Testament).

But seriously, when the edit is complete, and you read your book through with “Track changes” set to “Final” so you can’t actually see what the editor’s done, you probably won’t want to change very much at all.

On Thursday I had a further phone call from that nice literary agent to see if I’d received the client agreement in the post. I know it doesn’t mean anything yet, in the grand scheme of things, but this is indeed A Step in the Right Direction.  On the way home from work I bought a bottle of bubbly to celebrate–I’d expected a real struggle to score an agent simply because so many have an entry in Writers & Artists that says “No fantasy, thanks”–and allowed it to go to my head for a little while.

Then I had to knuckle down to the serious business of getting together a synopsis for Trinity.  First draft down, just a little tweaking to do; it’s a tad longer than I’d like.

The omens are that I’ve left myself a bit of a mountain to climb in order to wrap everything up in Book 3.  Forcing myself to focus on the plotting of Trinity and what I could and could not do with the characters and timescales has thrown into sharp relief just how ambitious I’ve been here, without me even realising it.  The curse of the pantser.

Pruning will have to occur, no doubt about it, but how much?  And where?  Do I go all bonsai on its donkey and force it to fit, or do I follow my organic instincts and let the tree be free, man?  I’m not sure yet.  My brain is still full of Bollinger.  Ask me again in the morning, when my brain will no doubt be full of Nurofen.

So I’ve started on Book 2 of “The Wild Hunt Trilogy”, “Trinity Moon”.  I confess, I’ve cheated a bit – there was a sub-plot in Book 1 that I was deeply attached to but it wasn’t deeply attached to the rest of the opening story arcs and just didn’t fit, timeline-wise.  So I cut it out, all 40-odd k of it, earlier this year and realised that it should have been in Book 2 all along, and I’d been trying to cover too much ground in Book 1.

It needs an edit, since it hasn’t had the same amount of attention that Songs has, which is what I’m doing now, and the excitement has started to build.  I’m getting that little wobbly buzz under my breastbone again, and I’m absolutely dying to get through the edit and start turning the plan into some real new chapters.

Oh, didn’t I mention?  I’ve actually got a plan for “Trinity”.  Me, the walking definition of a pantser, has A Plan.  I’ll have a synopsis next, just you wait.

It’s done.

The final edit on Songs, that is.  I should be relieved, elated, but I’m not.  It feels like an anticlimax (there’s that word again).  I was expecting some great rush of triumph as I hit the final full stop and clicked “Save”.  Instead all I got was “Jeez, is that the time?”

So what am I going to do with my evenings and weekends now?  I have been living and breathing this book for the last year; my husband looks up when I enter the room and asks “Who are you again?”

But that’s me.  When I’m writing, I am totally immersed in it, saturated by it.  I think about it on the loo, in the bath, on the train, in the five minutes between phone calls at work when I really should be digesting the latest epistle from HMRC.  Now that it’s done, I find myself vaguely bereft.

My reading has been sadly neglected.  Richard K Morgan and Joe Abercrombie stare reproachfully at me from the shelves where their new books have been sitting, unopened, since I bought them the day they came out.  Unread books in this house are an Abomination, and I have two dozen Abominations in the study.  I’m afraid to go in there.

So I’ve started querying agents.  I’ve been writing stories since I could write, pretty much.  Started aiming at novel-length fiction when I was a teenager.  I read once that the first million words is just practice and if that’s the case, I’ve served my apprenticeship and then some.  Let’s see if we can’t make all this hard work worthwhile.

Any writer will tell you it’s hard work writing a novel.  What’s even harder is the final edit, when you have to trim and prune and polish until the damn thing shines so bright it’s blinding.

Unfortunately all that trimming and pruning and polishing means cutting stuff out.  Stuff you love.  “But it’s mine!” you howl.  “It’s mine and I love it and I don’t want to be parted from a single word of it.”  Sound familiar?

No matter how much you tell yourself that it’ll be a better book for it, you won’t believe it at first.  Then you’ll get to a point say 35% of the way through and you start to develop a bit of detachment and think yeah, I can do this–and what’s more, it’s fun.

This carries you through the next 50% of the job, and then it all comes to a shuddering halt, right as you turn into the home straight.  This is where I find myself today.

I’ve done the hard part, taken 15k words out of a somewhat overfed manuscript and rewritten a few chapters that just weren’t cutting it.  The result is cleaner, tighter, better paced and does more with less.  I’m well happy with it.

My problem is this.  In the big finale–I hate to use the word climax.  Maybe it’s my mucky mind but it just seems, well, rude, quite frankly.  It is inextricably linked to gentlemen’s top-shelf periodicals and Newcastle’s only blue movie cinema, which had a name beginning with C and ending in ax, with a lime in the middle.  But I digress.

In the big finale, the bad guy doesn’t appear.  I thought long and hard about this, and decided that he should.  It is, after all, his show.  And I had an idea that he should saunter on set in one of his Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen silk shirts and taunt My Hero about his girlfriend.  It’s the kind of thing he’d do.

So I started looking for where I could engineer an appearance by the bad guy.  And bugger me if I couldn’t find one.  The finale chapters work so well as they are that shoehorning anything in is just going to upset the balance (and you don’t want to start upsetting the balance in the Force, mate–anything could happen).

I therefore find myself in a quandary.  My head says a finale without the bad guy and My Hero squaring off is not much of a finale at all.  Dare I say it, an anti-climax.  And my heart is saying, don’t bugger about with it or you’ll spoil it.  Of course the logical way to approach this is to employ the wonderful “Save As…” command and make a copy of where I’m at right now, try the edit, and see if it works.  If it does, great.  If it doesn’t, no harm done, go back to the backup and all it’s cost me is a couple of late nights (sucks having to work for a living, eh?)

I am, however, a writer, and therefore only peripherally acquainted with logic.  None of this book or either of its sequels has been planned.  It has evolved on tea, chocolate biscuits and four hours’ sleep a night (sucks having to work…etc)

Aargh.

This, as my dad’s colleague used to say, is a two-biscuit problem.  I need more Hobnobs.