This Writing Life

It has been a long time coming, but today I publish Proper Job, a comedy novel whose first draft I completed more than seven years ago (US). How do I feel? Exhausted. Pleased. Quite interested to see how well the book will do on the Kindle platform in comparison to Déjà Vu and Flashback. I feel that science fiction does well in ebook form; but Proper Job, being a comedy lacking in lasers, bug-eyed monsters and time travel, should have a broader appeal.

The book evolved on several fronts across the course of its development. The initial draft was edgier. Its main character – then called Fabe, not Andy – was a crueller individual. It was novel where the main character and the reader laughed ‘at’ things. Now, the novel is one where the laughter is ‘with’.

Structurally, too, I changed some elements to take it away from the somewhat Hollywood three-act structure. These explicit frameworks are well and good in retrospect, but my experience of writing Proper Job has confirmed my prejudice that they are best applied in retrospect to help fix problems. They cannot be used as a blueprint. (That is, I can’t use them like that.)

So here it is. The final draft is about 60,000 words, I believe. With revisions, I probably worked through 200,000 or more.

Subtext and – of course – schmubtext. However, Proper Job is also about my relationship with Cornwall.

Thanks to my stalwart editor Clare Christian and equally stalwart proofer Olivia Wood, without whom Proper Job would be a wibbly pile of kack.

Publish and be damned.