B1C15

Babies are beautiful...

I am really happy with this chapter's ending. The night I wrote it, I sent this to my editor.

Then I didn't pick up my pen for a year.

...but they are born ugly

I started writing this book in July 2022. It is currently February 2025. I hope to be done in October 2025 (edit: November 2025?), a loooooong three and a half years after I started writing it. As you can see in the chart above, were long periods of time when I didn't write at all because the book was so bad it was not worth my time.

"The book was so bad" is not false modesty. You know what I had in my planning doc for the first draft, the one I wrote all the way back in July 2022? This was my mystery plot:

• Paul never got to eat the test drug. Someone switched it out for powdered sugar. 
• The detective finds a little piece of pink paper from the powdered sugar sachet on the floor. He asks everyone for their coffee preference but no one takes sugar with their coffee and the lab does not have any other sachets. 
• [Murderer] buys coffee every day and could have picked up a sachet at a coffee shop. 
• When Paul drank the test drug, he said “success tastes sweet,” but everyone thought he was being figurative.

The bullet points above are direct quotes. I was going to write a whole-ass detective novel where my world-famous super-genius detective was going to solve a case based on Sweet 'n Low.

I tried to motivate myself to persevere despite the shit plot by letting myself write all the cool and fun chapters first. That worked until I wrote all my banger lines, and then around the time of the screenshot above, I had said all the cool and fun stuff I wanted to say and that was that.

I came back to the book in late 2023, because I am a masochist, and because one of my bucket list items is to finish a goddamn book, and even though this book idea sucked, all of my other book ideas sucked even more. I had this great idea that maybe I should try dictating my chapters out loud and using AI to transcribe them. In theory, this would make writing the not-cool and not-fun chapters not-painful. I don't think the dictation was actually helpful, but it felt novel enough that I stuck with the writing process. I finished a first draft, and even a second one, and that was as far as I could get without a real plot.

In the fall of 2024, I was unhappy with my job, and again I thought "wouldn't it be cool if I was a real writer???" Thus I returned to my own personal Sisyphean torture. This time though, I had a lot of really good ideas:

• What if I added some cool visual effects to the book?
• What if I set it in a slightly futuristic world where AI is a big deal?
• What if I wrote a blog about the process of writing?
• What if I finally came up with a real plot?

Finally, on my third draft, more than two years after starting, the idea of completing this book wasn't agonizing. I could set goals like "work a little bit every day" without feeling like I was punishing myself. The muses are finally singing, all I need to do is transcribe what they're saying.

All this to say, I never fully internalized what people meant when they said that their first drafts are trash. This is the first time I've gotten more than 5,000 words into a book, and oh boy, it's been a learning experience.