The math we use to make ourselves feel better

Yesterday my dyslexic flatmate was frustrated that she spent 5 hours writing an essay outline (850 words).

I'd say 850 words in 5 hours isn't a failure. The essay outline is finished and says everything it was meant to. That makes it a successful piece of writing.

I spent 5 hours yesterday watching the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and I produced exactly 0 words during that time. The way I see it, any time spent on writing is better than none, any work produced is better than none, and any finished piece is a totally badass success of which to be proud.

Ten percent of nothin' is, let me do the math here... Nothin' into nothin', carry the nothin'...

But of course the frustration isn't the finished work, it's the time taken to get there.

850 words in 5 hours is 170 words in an hour, which doesn’t seem like many. Until you consider that it's 170 finished words an hour, so 170 words of polished, edited, shiny-happy writing. There were hundreds of other words which she threw out along the way, from outlines to practice sentences or excess trimmed out to keep the outline within ideal parameters.

The first Harry Potter is just shy of 77,000 words. If my flatmate kept producing 170 shiny words per hour for 5 hours a day, that's Harry Potter in 90 days. From 0 to Harry Potter in roughly 3 months.

Of course that's not exactly how it works. In my experience, longer novels need exponentially more editing and reworking than shorter novellas. There's an incredible amount of variation from book to book and author to author, and I would never devalue the effort of creating a finished short story. And yet, on top of my anecdotal evidence, there's the simple maths that if any chunk of writing needs X amount of reworking, the more chunks there are then the more editing and reworking.

I realized that I, a writer with a love of spreadsheets, am so used to calculating word count averages that I take them for granted. I love numbers and stats and goals. And sometimes, when you're feeling down about your writing, you have to do the quick and dirty math that will make you feel better.

The easiest example is what I did at the start of this post: think of the time you spent writing and compare it what you achieved in the same space of time not spent on writing. Maybe you got an hour of writing in today and your story didn't move far, but compare that to the eight or so hours at work in which your story didn't move at all. Congratulations, from a writing perspective you're more productive in your spare time than at work!

You can think of your writing as chunks of a finished work, or estimate how many books you'd be able to create if you kept this pace up every day for the rest of your life.


It's so easy to feel low comparing ourselves to prolific authors or even our own personal bests. We can take a step back and remind ourselves that any writing is a success and, if not a step toward a goal, then at least practice. But sometimes dirty math is the only cure to the writing blues.

This is your brain on two months of serial fiction

I'm working on a serial story, a m/m werewolf romance novel uploaded free to the internet chapter by chapter. I've just uploaded chapter eight which brings the story so far to just under 20k, so it's impressive to see how a little bit every week adds up over time.

My idea with Omega Blues was to complete a draft then edit and upload it in chapters, but of course a first draft is often little more than a vague outline that shows you what you want to write for your actual story. This and the next two chapters are completely fresh and not in the original draft.

When I started uploading Omega Blues at the start of March, I had a 50k-or-so manuscript to work from. In the last couple of weeks I've been re-imagining the story to make it more dramatic—cutting something into 2k chunks really makes you realize where the dull, infodumpy sections are! I've tossed aside well over half of the original writing. The fresh draft couldn't have existed without the first draft, and it definitely wouldn't be shaping up the way it is if I hadn't worked chapter-by-chapter to focus in on the best story I can possibly craft.

I've wanted to write a weekly serial for years, but all the blog posts I'd read couldn't prepare me for the experience. Like with any novel, it's an experience unique to the writer and the novel. Between work stress and band practice, I've been drained this month, and I'm confident that I wouldn't have been able to achieve as much as I have if I hadn't put in place weekly deadlines.

On the other hand, editing Omega Blues each week takes days of writing time away from my next novella, Prima Donna Boy. In the past I've seen that multi-tasking on writing projects makes them all go slower so the time between publishing drags out longer and longer. While I think this is true here—I defnitely would be further through edits on Prima Donna if I didn't keep switching to Omega Blues—the weekly chapter uploads are proof that I am getting something done.

With writing there's a war between wanting to write fast and furiously, creating 'in the moment' with no breaks and no distractions, and wanting to take a break to plan and think about the story. Handling these two stories at once has forced me into the latter mindset, but I figure as writers we should always be experimenting and trialing, in our writing practice as well as in the writing itself.

There are plenty of anecdotes about famous writers and their routines and superstitions. They can be terrifying for a new writer because they're told from the perspective of full-time writers with established careers. Those writers always seem so definite: the only way to get any writing done is to do it exactly like this and yet there's so much conflicting advice.

The thing is, every writer is different and there isn't a one-size-fits-all writing habit. Before we know what's going to work for us, we have to experiment. From the time of day when we write to the level of distraction we can handle (music, a cafe, silence?) to the way the story itself is created—intricate planning or broad brushstrokes? Write from the start to the end, or from a key scene outwards? How much can and should a story change while it's being written?—every writer and every book will be different.

I've lived in isolation, writing in a cabin in the woods with no internet or phone reception, and I have Boganettes, Hot Blood Punk and Mr Wonderful to show for it. Now I'm living in a city and writing in stolen moments between irregular work hours, a reading challenge and intense band practices. I have Omega Blues to show for it and, whatever else I can produce, I know I'll be learning more about myself and my writing from the different experience.

The latest chapter of my free werewolf m/m romance, Omega Blues, is now live on Wattpad!

The Only Rule for Writing Paranormal

Whenever we write, we're creating within a framework of existing stories—all the fiction that came before us and that influences and shapes our writing.

Even if you want to create the most fresh and original story possible, you still want to create a story that people enjoy, so that means obeying basic laws of writing: narrative flow, conflict, dialogue, the story building up and increasing in tension before reaching a resolution, etc.

The vast majority of writers know the genre they're writing in, and that means expectations you need to take into account. It's hard to satisfy readers with a crime novel if the crime's not solved by the end of the book, people will be disappointed in a horror that's not scary, and so forth.

Another Earth, 2011, is rare for a successful science fiction film in that it deliberately breaks the expectations of science fiction and steps away from the fantastic.

When we write stories about the paranormal, we're not just working within story structure and genre conventions, we're also working with what people know and expect from our paranormal creatures. Because vampires and shapeshifters don't exist, there's no set definition of how they actually work.

Readers would be confused if you wrote about talking cats in a book that wasn't labelled as 'fantasy', because we've all experienced cats and never seen them talk. But with non-existing creatures, we get to decide how they'll function in our story.

Drunk is still my favorite Ed Sheeran song.

But that doesn't mean we can completely ignore reader expectations. If we're stepping too far from the accepted parameters of our paranormal creature, it can be better to call them something else. The zombies in 28 Days Later or I Am Legend are called 'virals' because they're not true zombies—re-animated corpses—but also because they don't fit the slow, shambling, totally mindless expectation of zombies.

I've heard more than one person complaining that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series featured vampires too far out of expectations, then praising The Vampire Chronicles without caring that Anne Rice's vampires are far from Bram Stoker's or even the vampires from folklore. You don't have to like Twilight (I'm personally uncomfortable seeing abusive relationships romanticized, I dream of a world where healthy and fulfilling relationships are romanticized and I try to create my own romance novels accordingly), but it seems contradictory to criticize one book for changing vampire myths then praising another one which also breaks vampire myths.

What We Do in the Shadows, 2014, as a comedy can get away with featuring many different and conflicting kinds of vampires.

As you might have noticed from the Meyers rant, I don't like people policing what's 'real' or 'true' with non-real creatures. As long as your story stays true to itself, I don't care how you deal with the paranormal. The whole point of paranormal creatures is that they're not normal – they're not something we can see every day, like a cat, so there is no one set of rules for how they should behave.

When we write paranormal, just like when we write genre or any narrative story, we get to decide which expected elements we'll pay attention to and which we'll ignore. And that means being aware of the conventions of paranormal in the genre we write. Meyers vampires aren't horror vampires, but they fit within the expectations of romance vampires—like the Vampire Diaries series of YA romance novels by L. J. Smith.

You can tell they're romantic leads because they all look gorgeous.

I've never written vampires, but I do write werewolves in my Jagged Rock series. They're romance novels so the werewolves are romance werewolves—all about strength and power and beauty, rather than the terror and mystery associated with horror werewolves.

The thing is, I've often heard fans of horror werewolves saying what a shame it is that werewolves never got turned into romantic leads the way vampires have. And I want to tell them, they have! You're just reading the wrong genre!

Whitley Strieber's The Wolfen. Not a romance.

You could write a horror werewolf as a romantic lead, but it would be quite a different story than most werewolf/shifter romance readers are expecting. As with any kind of reversal of expectations—like a sci-fi that drags the camera away from its sci-fi elements—you need to be aware of the expectations so you know when you're subverting them. Because, at the end of the day, you can write anything you want; but if you want to satisfy your readers then you need to be honest with them and know what they'll expect from your genre and paranormal creatures.

I've never written vampires, but I do have a series of free werewolf romances called Jagged Rock. The second one, Omega Blues, is a weekly serial on Wattpad and you can find the fifth chapter here.

What I learned from living in isolation

A year ago I was so overwhelmed by stress and anxiety that I chucked it all in and moved to the wilderness. I rented a cottage alone in the New Zealand bush with spectacular views, no internet or cell reception, and a five-hour bicycle ride through the mountains to the nearest shop.

It was the best year ever.

Here's what I learned...

I'm exactly who I thought I was.

I've always suspected that I'm the kind of introvert who would flourish in complete isolation, but I never knew for sure. Turns out I am, and living alone is awesome.

My stress is from people.

I can't talk for anyone else at all, but it turns out my stress and anxiety come entirely from social interactions.

When I moved into the wilderness I went abruptly from being an anxious and stressed-out wreck to a sedate blob in a constant state of low-level contentment. Suddenly my only concern in the whole world was whether I cleaned my cottage too much to damage the balance of bacteria in the septic tank.

What I care about.

It was important to me that I didn't force myself to do anything. I told myself that if I wanted then I could just spend my days reading books and looking at trees.

Yet I didn't go a day without writing. Maybe that's force of habit after years of daily writing, but even that's awesome. I needed to write to feel happy.

Turns out writing is definitely what I care about and an essential part of my life.

What you do with your day changes how you think.

This sounds obvious but I've never seen it as clearly as I did when I lived in isolation. My mind got slow and relaxed and I'd only think book thoughts.

But when I cycled into town and got phone reception, suddenly I'd be back to thinking about people and social concerns or whatever I read on the internet. It was like a stain that seeped into my way of thinking for hours afterward.

If I know about gigs that I'm not going to, I feel bad for missing out. But when I didn't know anything that was going on I never felt lonely or like I was missing something. You truly can't miss what you don't know you're missing.

You get used to things quickly.

I know plenty of people who say they couldn't live without the internet, but after a few weeks you don't even think about it anymore. Habits are easy to break when there's no opportunity.

Not talking to anyone? Not a problem when it's your choice and you're used to it. Weekly cycle ride to buy supplies? Goes from a big deal to taken for granted.

Who we are and what we care about is shaped so much by what we're exposed to every day. I was incredibly fortunate to get this chance and I found out who I am for real and what's important to me—and I like that person.

Unfortunately it's not financially viable to keep living in the bush and reading books full-time, otherwise I would still be there today. But even though my year's up and I'm returning to the world of social stress and job stress, I'm glad that I got this chance to look at beautiful scenery every day and worry about nothing deeper than cleaning supplies.

Writing is like being in a band

 I recently started drumming with an original band, as opposed to the cover bands I've been in before. It got me thinking about all the parallels we can draw between creating music and writing fiction.

It's crucial to understand your influences.

When I auditioned for my band, right off the bat I was asked about my influences. The guitarist and main songwriter loves Black Sabbath while I come from the Slayer branch of metal titans, though we both have Megadeath and Pantera in common. What do I mostly listen to? What do I practice to? How does my jazz training alter my approach? And so on.

Bands are music crowdsourced. Each member brings in their own string of influences and, to make unity, you have to agree on who the key influences are.

This involves being fully aware of your own influences, which is harder than it sounds. And it's just as crucial with writing as with being in a band. What genres do you love, which specific writers? Even if they're outside your genre, the writers that you absorb and think about every day will change your approach to storytelling.

It would be cool to say that you're completely original and spinning pure fiction out of the air. But in the real world that doesn't work. As a writer you're a reader and everything you read influences you. All your passions and hobbies, your friends and family (and the kind of things they talk about and stories they tell) will influence your writing.

It's vital to know your influences so you don't accidentally plagiarize, but also so you're aware of the kind of novel you want to create – and to understand where the heck your novel came from once you've created it.

 Some people have more talent than others but practice matters.

If you start off great, you'll get better with practice. If you start off rubbish, you'll still get better with practice (provided you're not just repeating the same mistakes again and again, which is easier to spot in music than in writing).

The thing that I have to remind myself a lot is that your output matters. You can be the best band in the world and no one will know if you don't leave the garage. If you never finish that beloved manuscript, no one else can ever enjoy it.

This sounds obvious but I have to remind myself of it every day when I want to keep doing rewrite after rewrite on a romance novel that's taken me years.

 When it's done right, it looks effortless.

I've always wanted to read a first draft of my favorite authors because I find it impossible to even imagine how their novels could have been different, they are so superbly well-crafted and complete.

Of course there were many decisions made along the way, many possible ways the story could have gone, countless drafts and revisions and edits.

With stories you work it through on your own then get input from friends and beta readers and eventually editors. With a band, quite often you're composing your songs as a team so you get the input right up front.

But either way, you're looking at an immense amount of work and complex decisions which boil down to one finished product. If you've created that story or that track correctly, it's going to sound natural and completely effortless.

Which sounds depressing, until you consider the alternative...

 If you get it wrong, everyone's a critic.

Doesn't matter that they're not a musician or a writer, just like it doesn't matter that most people yelling at sports teams would get steamrollered if they walked onto that field. Whether you're in a band or writing a book, you'll meet plenty of criticism.

 No one can see the hours you put in to get there.

Other writers can acknowledge the effort it takes and can understand the months or years put into something that might be read in a few hours or a day. But a lot of non-writers have trouble seeing it.

In a band, nothing matters but the minutes on stage. That's all the audience can see: your finished product, a few minutes to show for the hours of practice, not to mention the years of learning your instrument.

It's the same with a book. Unless you wow the reader with the book they pick up (or the first pages of the book, or the blurb...) then they won't know or care how long it took you to write it. 

 It doesn't matter how much work you put in if it's not someone's cup of tea.

People won't be fans of your band just because you practice all the time. People probably aren't going to like your novel any better just because it took a long time to write.

And, like anything else, even if you love it then it's no guarantee anyone else will. Everybody's different. I think my band are awesome, but if you don't like 80's heavy metal then you probably won't like us. I think Pride And Prejudice is pretty near perfect but that doesn't mean my thriller-loving neighbor will.

 We do it because we love it.

Sure, it's possible my band will be the new Metallica. It's possible your novel will be a bestseller. It's possible we'll get recognition and money.

Possible, but not probable.

Luckily that's not why we do it. We don't join garage bands or write novels solely because we want to get rich. Maybe some people do, and that's cool for them. But the problem with money as a motive is that when there isn't money, there's no motivation. Statistically your first novel won't be a success – it won't get published, and if you self-publish it won't make more than $500. Your band won't get talent spotted and signed on the first night.

It takes work to keep writing books and keep practicing music. If you're lucky then that work might lead to financial success, but that's a lot of what if's and slim chances.

For most of us, we're doing this because we love it. Not every minute of it, sure. There are days I have to force my hands onto my computer keyboard and days I struggle not to just drop my drum sticks and walk away.

Often, if I push through it, those bad days will get better when I let go of the world and get invested in the flow of story or rhythm. But still, it's not easy to keep at it day after day after day. A lot of kids learn instruments, but how many keep playing as adults? That's because it's hard to keep at it.

But what gets us through is the end goal. All of this practicing and writing will mean that the song or the novel will slot together as a finished whole, something of which to be proud.

And, sure, we'd all like to be famous and successful. Not necessarily for the money, but because we believe in the product. Our novel will add something to literature, our band has good songs that might get stuck in your head and, at the least, will contribute to the local scene.

What we're creating is something we believe in. It's worth the effort.