★ Proper Job

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.