Last week, while on a zoom with a few friends on mine, one asked “what are you writing?” I was a bit stunned at the question. I’m always writing, to start with, but also I didn’t realise this particular friend knew that I wrote at all. “Anything sci fi?” they asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “A book about a kid in space.”
“Sounds awesome. Tell me more.”
I struggled to find words to sum up this 800 page behemoth I’d been writing for years, but I ploughed ahead. I’ve always been one to write enormous novels, and summing my work up into the hallowed synopsis or the blurb has never been my strong point. I want a marketing genius to read my novel and sum it up for me…
“It’s about a kid who’s a genius who owns his own spaceship, who runs packages for a mail company. And he gets stuck in the middle of an inter-galactic war, and there’s a wormhole that goes horribly wrong and he and a crew of a warship get stuck out beyond the boundaries of known space. And they discover a lot of things. More about each other, and about their enemy, and about the origins of the war, and there’s genetic manipulation and all kinds of things.”
“Cool,” said my friend. “When can I read it?”
“Soon,” I said, lying through my teeth with a smile. “I’m totally nearly finished it.”
In all honesty, I’m on the seventh draft, and at the 11th hour I had decided to completely re-write the last six chapters to make the ending more insane and wonderful. And after deciding which direction to go, I immediately procrastinated and went on to do something else. I really, really need to finish that draft.
And that’s what good friends are for: they give you deadlines and expectations, otherwise I’d probably put it off forever.
And as for that blurb – I thought it wasn’t that bad after all: https://www.carogeelen.com/books/