Finishing a Manuscript

Righty-ho, still in the blogging game. Got a bag full of notes for blogs from the past few months about the things writers do to try and earn money, but they've drifted to the bottom like the lint in my pockets. Why? My manuscript.

I'm just finishing up a 90,000 word manuscript. Four years of on-again, off-again work, coming to some sort of conclusion, or more accurately, a way-marker. Not an end. Anyone who's undertaken a long-term writing project will agree; there's no magic moment when you've finished. When you say 'I'm finished,' you're setting yourself up for disappointment and risk annoying those around you who have put up with you rabbiting on about people that don't even exist for the past several years.

What I have done, more accurately, is reach the final page of my manuscript, An Englishman in Rocket City. It's how I want it, but there will still be changes, even after I've sent it off. When it hopefully finds a publisher, there will be other changes - minor ones, I hope. It's dangerous to say 'I'm finished,' because that suggests there's nothing left to do; just as dangerous as carrying on editing and reshaping ad infinitum.

This is draft six. It took me two years of sporadic work to get to draft three, which I sent out to agents. That's not counting the preliminary work I did while completing my previous novel. The responses I got told me what I'd already figured out, that the idea for the story was good, the writing was sound, but it wasn't quite there yet. In the mean time, I'd started another project, which I dropped in favour of getting An Englishman in Rocket City right.

Eight months into the rewrite, I realised that First Person wasn't my natural voice. My first novel, Johnny Lonely, had been in Third Person and I'd deviated from that as an experiment. Time to go back to the drawing board. Last September I started from the beginning again. Switching to Third Person immediately made the story funnier, the main character more sympathetic, and retained a sense of mystery.

Exactly one year on, I have a manuscript I'm happy with and enjoy reading. It was a gamble going back and rewriting the whole thing from scratch, but one I hope will pay off.

Now all those months of neglected engagements and blogging are possibly at an end. My next step is to find an agent.

I write this because I must - use an alias

I write this because I must - that about says it. I'm not particularly keen on adding my voice to the white noise of the internet, especially when I have a novel to complete, but then, that's exactly why I'm doing this. My friend and guru, the novelist Wendy Robertson, said some months back, 'Pete, you need to do a blog.' The Writers' Yearbook backed this up. So has just about everyone I've spoken to who's connected with the publishing industry. So there we are.

A couple of weeks ago, The Bookseller ran a headline stating that we're eighteen months away from the tipping point, the event horizon where sales of e-books will outnumber actual book books. A blog, therefore, is a necessary part of a writer's marketing strategy. Hurrah.

When my first book, Johnny Lonely, came out, I did actually start a blog on my myspace page. It wasn't actually my page, but the page of the main character in my novel, Hughie Youngkin. What a brilliant idea, I thought, to do the page as if it were really Hughie. This created a number of problems, foremost that nobody searching the web for Pete Tanton could find me, including myself. Only someone who had already read the book would think to search for Hughie Youngkin. Still, the page got friends.

Then I decided to start a blog. Although it was Hughie's page, I wrote the blog as myself, further confusing any would-be readers. 'My public will want to know about the quirky goings-on at my signings and events,' I thought, and maybe they both did, but there's only so much you can write about sitting for three hours at a table in Borders, haranguing the Starbuck's customers. Now that Borders is gone, of course, I wish I'd continued blogging - they'd be historical documents by now.

I tried it again with Facebook, made the same Hughie Youngkin mistake, unaware that by setting up an alias, I was breaking the fundamental rule of Facebook, and denying all the folks I went to high school with the chance to look me up and see my book. How many more copies could I have sold...

So here I am, learning from my mistakes, trying to do it properly. My current novel, An Englishman in Rocket City, is close to completion, and I suppose I'll be writing about that. Or rather, I'll be writing it. And possibly blogging.