But the celebratory lunch was for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, New Zealand’s highest science fiction honours handed out each year at their national science fiction convention. This year it was Au Contraire, held in Wellington, and when I checked my email on Monday morning I discovered that I’d won the award for Best Fan Publication for Time/Space Visualiser, the fanzine of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club that I edited from 2003 to 2009. The award was shared with Phoenixine, edited by John and Lynelle Howell.

I must say I was surprised and delighted to win the award, and my Weta Workshop-designed trophy thing is heading my way. Editing and designing TSV was a lot of work, supported by founding and co-editor Paul Scoones, who has posted some more cogent thoughts about the awards over at his blog.

And you know what? Being recognised for that is pretty gosh-darned cool.

Anyway, more details and a full list of all the winners is available at Tor.com and Science Fiction Awards Watch, and an archive of the awards ceremony live blog can be read here. For those interested in seeing the issue of TSV (#76) that qualified for the award and won the prize, it is available as a free PDF here.

It’s old news now, but Amazon opened the UK Kindle store on 5th August. Prior to this, you could buy Kindle ebooks from Amazon.com, but due to the addition of VAT and other mysterious charges, prices were often a little high. My voodoo steampunk novella, The Devil in Chains, for example was set at a price of 99 cents (the minimum, as you can’t give away free Kindle books), but UK customers had to pay something rather more (I think it was between $4 and $5, although I don’t remember).

The UK Kindle store is good news, then, and you can grab The Devil in Chains for just 72p. I’ve tried it out on the iPad’s Kindle app, and I have to say it looks pretty gosh-darned cool. I’d be interested to see it on an actual Kindle – hopefully I’ll be able to hijack one down at FantasyCon in September and take a look. I must admit the new Kindle, in smexy graphite grey, looks pretty cool and the price is terrific (£109 for the WiFi model, £149 for the WiFi + free 3G model)… but it’s a mono-functional eink device. Hmm. I carry too much stuff as it is.

As well as being “in print” this week, you can marvel at my mumbling half-New Zealand, half-British accent over at WordPunk. A couple of weeks ago I was a guest host on their Genre, Movies and TV, and Tech and Gadgets episodes, all of which are now online and available at their website or via iTunes. I had a great time on the show and my thanks to Del, Simon and James for having me on!

Right, back to the editing!

While I couldn’t make her BSFA event on Wednesday night, I was at the Forbidden Planet signing on Thursday, where a small but perfectly formed gathering got their limited hardcover editions of Lauren’s new book, Zoo City, personalised by the author before heading out for celebratory drinks. It was a really nice event and it was great to catch up with some friends, and as I expected Lauren was a delight in person. The limited hardcover (only 100 copies, exclusive to Forbidden Planet) is absolutely gorgeous too. Lauren brought me the South African paperback of Zoo City, published by Jacana, as well, which is a nice collector’s item with supercool Battlestar Gallactica corners.

So, all I need now is the regular UK paperback (out in September), the US paperback (January 2011), and the eBook, and I’ve got the set! Zoo City, I should point out, is an absolutely kick-ass book. I’ve plunged into the Jacana edition to read, and have hit the halfway mark after just a few days. If you can’t get the limited hardcover before it sells out, for goodness’ sake get the regular edition next month. Tying in to Zoo City, don’t forget there are five hand-illustrated Bares up for auction to support The Suitcase Project. Lauren brought one of them, Bi-Polar Bare, to London, and up-close it is a real work of art. The auctions run until August 10th!

On the way out to drinks, somebody spotted a familiar piece of art in Forbidden Planet’s window:

Fortunately they only had the shirt in an XL, so my wallet was spared. However, I’m taking the coincidental appearance of not-Ludmila in the window as a positive sign.

And as if I didn’t acquire enough reading material in just three days in London, I was met by this on the doormat when I got home on Sunday.

Two new books from two of my favourite authors, both in advance of their regular publication date. Not a bad weekend, all round!

Cue the Snoopy Dance: on Sunday, I finished the first draft of my supernatural space opera, Ludmila, My Love. I closed off the Scrivener file, backed it up, and celebrated with tea and toast (well, it was about 8 in the morning). First draft of my fourth novel done and dusted. Phew!

I must say, Ludmila was an odd book to write. Each novel has been a different experience, but I think this one will stick in my mind for a while. I’d built up an expectation for it in my own mind, perhaps more than my previous projects, which actually slowed things down a bit. I was thinking, rather than doing. But we’re there. Ludmila now goes into cold storage for a few months so I can forget about her… which is coincidental (not ironic!) to the story itself. With a bit of work here and there, it’s going to be a great big scary creepy book, I hope!

Thinking about what needs tweaking in this book brought to mind how I classify manuscript drafts. For example, while I have written the first draft of Ludmila, My Love, is it really ‘draft 1′? As Mur Lafferty once said, the first draft is the vomit draft, in which you write it all down before you forget the story. Importantly, it’s allowed to suck, and you’re allowed to no worry about it sucking, because you will fix it later. That’s quite logical too. If everything came out perfectly the first time around then writing would be a very fast process indeed.

Here then is my general drafting/editing process – as with any writing advice, I’m no expert, and never take anything as fact. What works for me might be completely alien to you. But here goes.

• Draft 0 – the vomit draft, the very first version of the manuscript that you manically type at strange times of the day. Warning: it might be ropey.
• Draft 1 – the fixed draft. The writing is tidied up, problems are fixed, plot holes sorted, continuity corrected. The end result is a draft that is readable and (hopefully) logical, even if it still holds a few problems.
• Draft 2 – the elbow grease draft. Chances are some larger problems or issues became apparent at draft 1 that require large fixes and perhaps even total rewrites of some chapters and sections. It may well be here where most of the editing work comes in.
• Draft 3 – the fixed draft, slight return. This another fixing run, checking and smoothing out the rewritten material from draft 2 in the context of the manuscript as a whole. Depending on the extent of the changes and fixes, the manuscript may then flip between the draft 2 and 3 states for as long as it takes to get it all right.
• Draft 4 – the beta version. This is the first version to show early/beta readers. This is the version that you should have 100% confidence in, and would be happy to publish the next day if you could. If you don’t/wouldn’t, then you need to go back and repeat drafts 2 and 3 until you are/you would. But, importantly, this is the version you want comments and opinion on. This is the version that you want readers to read, to tell the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s absolutely vital to adhere to this step, I think, because your beta readers will give you an outside perspective you can’t possibly get yourself, as close as you have been to the writing and the story.
• Draft 5 – the beta edit. Once your reader comments are in, you’re into the second of the two major edit drafts (along with draft 2), adjusting, tweaking, rewriting based on your reader’s feedback. As with each step, of course, the amount of work and the time required will vary and is impossible to predict. Draft 4 might have been nearly perfect, or your readers might have spotted a major problem that needs a big fix or found that there was something about the book that wasn’t working.
• Draft 6 – the final fix. This step is a repeat of draft 3, being the final overall tidy-up and check. Again, you may need to go back and forth between drafts 5 and 6 until everything is shipshape and Bristol fashion.
• Draft 7 – the finished manuscript. By my estimation anyway, draft 7 is the finished manuscript and the one you want to sell or shop around.

That might sound like a lot of drafts, or it might sound like too few. I’ve included some inbetween stages which might be better as 0.5 iterations of a draft, but that’s just my own preference. It might take a year to get to the end – and remember, this is after you’ve actually finished the book – or it might take just a couple of months. But for myself it’s important to have a plan, as I’ve got certain self-imposed deadlines and goals I want to meet, and pulling apart the editing process like this is a big help when it comes to setting those deadlines and also notifying my beta readers that something will be arriving. The list above is just my own system, broken down into steps. While draft 0 of Ludmila, My Love matures in the cupboard,  I’m diving into the edits on Empire State. Looking at my edit list, this book is nearly at draft 4, and will be ready for my beta readers in a couple of weeks.

Yesterday over at Fantasy Literature I talked about one of my favourite authors, Cherie Priest. Readers of this blog – and followers on Twitter – will already know how much I admire her work, and as part of an ongoing series in which guest writers tell the world the reasons for reading a particular author, I talk a little about why I do. This seems to be becoming something of a habit, as just last month I talked about her 2007 werewolf novella Dreadful Skin over at Dark Fiction Review.

So if you’re on the lookout for a new author to pick up, or if perhaps you’re familiar with Cherie through Boneshaker but haven’t tried her other work, I hope those two posts give you some encouragement to check her/them out. The next novel in her Clockwork Century series, Dreadnought, is currently on sale for $10.11 from Amazon.com, and the novella Clementine is due from Subterranean Press later this month.

Yesterday Angry Robot books launched their new monthly podcast, which features news from the publisher, interviews with their staff and authors, and competitions. And it’s hosted by none other than Mur Lafferty! It’s one of those weird convergences – I’ve followed Mur for years and have been a listener to her I Should Be Writing podcast since almost episode one, so to have her suddenly working with people I know in a completely different setting is very, very cool.

July’s installment took me by surprise a little. Seems I changed Angry Robot publishing director Marc Gascoigne’s mind about genre classification with my guest blog post, The Big Magic Shelf. How do I know? He says so himself, in the podcast! Needless to say, I’m chuffed at the mention, and it’s a fascinating discussion. The Angry Robot podcast promises to be a very interesting ongoing series!

Lastly, digital publishing is something I’m interested in, and have pretty much managed to convert myself to an all-ebook library now I have my iPad. I talked about going digital in my first Angry Robot guest blog, but one thing which has actually surprised me is my experience with trying to write on thing. I talk about writing on the iPad – specifically, why I don’t – over at Harry Markov’s blog, Through a Forest of Ideas.

Take it easy!

* And for goodness’ sake, go an see Inception. It’s an amazing, complex science-fiction film. Go!

Update: Seems FantasyLiterature is offline at the moment, so here’s a cached version of the Cherie Priest piece. I’ve let the site know, hopefully it’ll be back up ASAP.

One Book That Changed Your Life
Tricky, this. Various individual books have changed the way I looked at the world or have looked at books and writing. The Name of the Wind, Starship Troopers, Boneshaker, Harry Potter, Under the Dome, to name just a few, but really those are all small, individual pieces of a much larger picture. Those books, and many more, have been very important to me and to my life, but if I go right back to the beginning, it was not one book that changed my life, but 156 – the Target Doctor Who novelisations.

I started watching Doctor Who in 1985, when I was 7 and New Zealand television began a great run of episodes starting with The Mind Robber and The Krotons, and then everything from Spearhead from Space to Survival. It took five years to show all that, and it is what got me interested in science fiction in the first place. But the Target novelisations – adaptations of the TV stories – were what got me into reading. My primary school library had a huge shelf full of them, and soon after I began collecting them myself. I have a lot of memories and a couple of mildly interesting stories about the Target books that I can probably bore you to death with later, but for the moment I’ll just pick out the two most important ones for me.

My two favourite books were Marco Polo and The Android Invasion. As any fule kno, Marco Polo was the best of the television stories made, although now sadly missing from the archives, and the book is arguably the best of the Target range. In just 120 pages, John Lucarotti condenses his 7-episode magnus opus into a micro-epic that combines high adventure with education. At age 7, I was the only child in my class who knew that Cathay was an old name for China and that at high altitude the boiling point of water decreased.

However, no book cover in the history of publishing stirs more memories than the one for The Android Invasion. Between 1985 and 1988 I read this book on every summer holiday. In fact, I’m tempted to get it out of the cupboard this summer and give it a read. This book, I love.

The most important thing about the Target Doctor Who books is that they made me want to write, and I’ve got an exercise book full of fiction written by me, aged 7, from 1985. In fact, I can clearly pinpoint which story was on TV and which Target book I was reading at the time, as more often than not my own attempts were a weird hybrid of the two.

One Book You Have To Read More Than Once
I know some people have their own book rituals, like reading The Lord of the Rings once a year. Heck, I did it myself, reading The Android Invasion every summer! However, time starts to press as we get older and I really have too many books that I’ll quite possibly never get around to reading the first time, let alone a second or third time. I suspect, looking ahead here, that Under the Dome is a book I’ll return to again, being the first Stephen King novel I read (and only last year too) and having completely blown me away, and likewise ‘Salem’s Lot (see below).

However, while I may return to those if the whim takes me, I think one book I am consciously looking forward to rereading is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. This post-apocalyptic novel, first published in 1949, is truly beautiful and very moving. An essential read for every genre fan.

One Book You’d Want On A Desert Island
The Princess Bride. Oh, what a book. It came before the movie, obviously, and follows the established pattern of being much better than the film. What differs here is that the film is utterly amazing, which makes the book even more stupendous (Help! Please send more adjectives!). It’s also an incredible lie, from the fake introduction to the abridgement carried out by Goldman on S. Morgenstern’s original text to the extracts from the sequel, and it’s not until you near the end that you realise you’ve been led a merry dance. Stuck on a desert island, this book is all you need.

Two Books That Made You Laugh
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The first volume in this famous series is the perfect example of a great debut novel. This is the book that Douglas Adams had in his head for a decade or more, the story, characters, plot, settings and – importantly – the jokes having been worked out and polished and perfected over time in his mind before he set them down on paper. I think this shows. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is sheer poetry.

The Automatic Detective, by A. Lee Martinez. I couldn’t resist the premise when I heard it – The Automatic Detective is about a bright red robot who makes his living as a private detective in a weird, fantasy/science fiction city filled with monsters and mutants. It’s a hilarious, laugh-out-loud pulp adventure, but is also thoughtful and extremely well constructed. On the back of this book I scooped up the rest of Martinez’s back catalogue and he’s now one of my favourite authors.

One Book That Made You Cry
Hrmm. I’m not really sure I can answer this one, as I have never cried over a book. As a genre, I do find classic superheroes deeply moving because of the sheer optimism and wonder they represent, but Astro City by Kurt Busiek and DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke have brought tears of joy, rather than sadness.

Yep. Weird, right? Right.

One Book You’d Wish You’d Written
‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. This was his second novel and the one where his natural talent for writing and his now-recognisable skills at characterisation combined to produce what I think is the finest genre novel ever written. It’s perfect from beginning to end, thrilling and terrifying and complex. Here King stays absolutely true to what vampires are – evil, Satanic monsters – but more importantly he managed to craft a tale of the supernatural that is utterly believable, grounded strongly in everyday life. The events that befell the New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot could happen anywhere, anytime. It’s this connection with the reader that makes it a remarkable book.

It’s exactly the kind of book that makes me, as a writer, throw my hands up in despair. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and shake your head at frequent intervals, and then when it’s lying on the coffee table you eye it warily from the other room. With genius like that, what the heck is the point of trying?

And then that’s exactly what you do. ‘Salem’s Lot is an inspirational gold standard. To me it demonstrates perfectly the power of story and of character. If, one day, I can craft a book a tenth as good as ‘Salem’s Lot, I’ll die happy.

One Book You Wish Was NEVER Written
Huh. I’m not sure I understand this question. There are plenty of books I’m not interested in, and there are plenty of books I don’t like. I could rail about Stephanie Meyer or Charlaine Harris or, heck, Dan Brown, but they’re famous and popular and they have a heck of a lot of fans. Who am I to say you’re wasting your time with author X or book Y? Everybody is different, and the world certainly does not revolve around my opinion. Do I wish Twilight were never written? Sure, why not. But what a waste of time. What do I care? Not liking Stephanie Meyer’s work just means I don’t read it, and what right do I have to deny her legions of fans the enjoyment and entertainment they so clearly get from her books?

And besides, it’s far more interesting to hear about a good book from someone rather than a bad book.

Two Books You Are Currently Reading
Maybe I’m unusual in that I only read one book at once. If I do read two, I make sure they’re completely different forms, generally something like a novel and a graphic novel, maybe. As it happens, I’m currently reading Night Shift by Stephen King, which is a collection of short stories, and The Complete Bloom County volume 1, the first of  four or five large hardcover collections from IDW publishing all of Berkley Breathed’s Pulitizer-winning newspaper strips. I was lucky enough to snag a signed, numbered edition, and it’s a beautiful thing.

One Book You’ve Been Meaning To Read
I have a list as long as my arm of books I want to read – new releases, classics, books that have just accumulated over time. As I’m working my way through Stephen King’s catalogue, I have The Stand coming up shortly, which I’ve been looking forward to and which is regarded as his best work (if it can beat ‘Salem’s Lot I’ll be surprised, pleasantly!).

But there is one book that has been on my to-be-read list since 1987. Seriously. Over the last 23 years I’ve been meaning to read Dracula by Bram Stoker. It’s there on the shelf, a hardback double-bill with The Lair of the White Worm. This is the exact book I’ve had since I was nine. I can clearly remember taking it to primary school and starting it during a wet lunchtime when we weren’t’ allowed to go outside. I’m not sure how far I got.

Every few years since then, I’ve picked the book up, and made a start. I’ve read the first 100 pages or so about dozen times. Now, I like it. It’s become fashionable in recent years to diss the book, but I the epistolary format is probably my favourite mode of writing, and on each occasion when I’ve started the book, I’ve loved it. But I’ve always stopped, and I’m never sure why. It’s not exactly long or difficult. Hmm. Maybe I’ll bump it up my list.

Some people think that starting out with short stories is a good way to hone your craft. Some people think it’s good practice. I agree, to a certain extent, although I’d argue that short- and long-form fiction are so utterly different that writing twenty 5,000-word stories won’t tell you much about writing one 100,000-word one. But I don’t have much beef with the advice. If you like it, listen to it.

But then some people think that it is a compulsory path to publication, that you must earn your dues in the short story market before anyone will take you seriously with a novel. It’s a natural, logical, and standard progression, they say.

The one problem with writing advice – any writing advice – is that people tend to listen to it and follow it to the letter. Writing is one of those things where there are rules and basics, and once you’ve got a handle on them you can pretty much do what you like. If something works for you, wonderful. Chances are it won’t work for the next person along, but that doesn’t matter. Write how you want to write, what you want to write. It might take you a while to work out the nuts and bolts of it – and that’s where writing advice and guidebooks can help – but eventually you’ll fine your own routines, and habits, and practices.

But the perception that short stories are a compulsory starting point sticks in my craw a little. Because – and here it is, brace yourselves – I don’t like short stories.

This is, of course, not true.

My favourite author is HP Lovecraft, who wrote nothing but short stories and a few novellas. I’m halfway through Night Shift, Stephen King’s first published collection of shorts, and a couple of pieces in there might be the best things I’ve ever read. I have plenty of friends who write a lot of short fiction – I’m lucky enough to be a beta-reader for Jennifer Williams, and nothing she has ever shown me has failed to amaze and delight. Some people have a knack for short fiction, and when short fiction is good, it’s great. You’ll get no argument from me on that point.

But mostly it’s not. Or at least that’s what I’ve found. Every now and again I go on a splurge, convincing myself that I need to pay more attention to short fiction, and go and buy a stack of short fiction magazines – American ones, British ones, famous and long-running titles, obscure and new ones, online magazines and electronic magazines and printed magazines.

After a couple of weeks of reading, I’m back at the beginning again. All I’ve done is prove, yet again, that I don’t like short fiction, and that more often than not, short fiction doesn’t work. At best, it leaves me unsatisfied and disappointed. At worst, it makes me curse the fact that I’ve spent an hour desperately hoping for a good resolution or twist or just an ending that works. Usually it never comes.

And then I think about Quitters, Inc, or The Sea, The  Sea, The Sea, or The Whisperer in Darkness, and about how wonderful short fiction can be, when it works. A perfect short story is a glittering jewel.

Now, if I don’t like reading it, and I sure as hell don’t like writing it.

This is, of course, not true.

I’ve written a fair bit of short fiction, and had some published. It’s quite a privilege to be accepted by Hub magazine, and I’ve had great comments from people who have enjoyed these stories. I’ve got some more pieces coming up too, and the excitement that comes when an idea strikes is a marvelous thing.

But as a rule, I don’t write short fiction. I don’t exactly fold my arms and huff and puff and turn my nose up at it, but I certainly never sit down to deliberately write one, unless that magical idea has arrived (usually fully formed) in my mind. When I’m roughing out ideas and plot, it’s always, always for novel-length fiction. I never deliberately try and plot out a short story, because I’m just not interested. My short stories are accidents and coincidences. Sometimes they even work!

But the angst is still there. Other writers posting on Twitter or their blogs – how many short stories do you have out circulating right now? asked one. I have 12, they said, the fewest all year! Another friend posted an update on their blog – this week I sold story A to magazine B, story X to magazine Y, and story 71 to magazine 98.

Wow. For some, it seems, its easy. A short story a week is a common personal  target for a lot of writers. I’m lucky if I can write one a quarter.

But then it clicked. Yes, sometimes the penny takes a long while to hit the ground.

I’m not a short story writer. I write novels. I like novels. Novels give me satisfaction to write and enjoyment to read.

Importantly, there is nothing wrong with this. It’s the style and form I have found myself drawn to quite naturally, without any particular conscious decision. Novels. I like ‘em!

But what about this road to success from short to long fiction? Sure, a lot of writers – a lot of big, famous, successful names – have followed it and for a lot of writers its a very good idea indeed. But it’s certainly not compulsory. Some people – like me – are just not wired for short fiction. I don’t like the saxophone or olives either. It doesn’t matter. All that means is that I don’t try and learn the saxophone and I don’t eat olives. So when it comes to short fiction, I usually don’t read it and I usually don’t write it, unless there is a very good reason to do either.

So when someone tells them that you must spend a decade writing short fiction before you try a novel, stop and think about what you want to do. This may be absolutely ideal. Or, like me, it might make you recoil in horror. I think it’s important to note that short and long fiction are completely different forms, and while starting with short fiction would certainly teach you the fundamentals of grammar, punctuation, etc, diving straight into a novel will probably teach you more about the long form. Sure, at the end of it you might not have something worth a damn, but it’s the experience that counts. Get those million words out and then write something great.

Always approach writing advice with caution. Including this!

Turnout should have been higher too, but I’d have to say maybe the timing of his UK tour was a bit odd. The Passage came out in the UK on the 24th June, and less than two weeks later here he was signing books at various Waterstones branches. Given the immense size of The Passage, not that many people will have been able to finish it yet. However, he’s in high demand, naturally, so if this was the only time for a UK signing tour, then so be it. I’m expecting bigger crowds when he pulls in next year for the second book. By then, I think, he’ll be a very big name indeed in the UK. At the moment, most of the buzz about The Passage seems to be US-based, and while SF fans on this side of the pond have been looking forward to the book for a while, his profile doesn’t seem that high here.

But he was was a seriously nice guy, and the small crowd that showed all looked extremely happy to be there. I played the ultimate book geek and brought my US hardcover, UK hardcover and UK ARC for him to sign, and he was pretty impressed at my collection. He also complained about how full of errors the ARC was!

It’s not often you get to meet a literary superstar, especially one at such a relatively early stage in their career. Thanks to Waterstones and Orion for the opportunity!

Update: Amazon.com has just issued their picks for the best books of 2010 so far, with The Passage top of the list!

Crunch time. Things to do. Plans to hatch. Goals to achieve. Time to refocus and get cracking and… well, all that stuff.

So let’s recap:

Hello! My name is Adam, and I’m a New Zealand-born writer based in the North West of England. I write science fiction, horror, steampunk, superhero, fantasy. Not all together, and not all at once, but I enjoy many different genres, and if I have a story to tell, it doesn’t matter much to me how you classify it. It’s all speculative fiction, put it that way. Robots or ghosts or monsters or spaceships or people that can fly.

Easy.

I’ve had one novella and one short story published, with two more short stories to appear sometime this year. I also won a flash fiction competition, which, although tiny, counts!

I’ve written three novels, and am working on my fourth. My novels are unpublished, although I’m trying to do something about that. I much prefer long fiction to short fiction, but that’s a topic for another post.

So there we go. We all square? Cool.

This blog is intended to chart my writing progress, for me to share thoughts on the process with you, and also with me, because sometimes writing stuff down can help to solve a problem or to bring clarity to something. It also provides a little motivation for myself and is a good way to warm the fingers up in the morning before I get to work.

I also blog about Stephen King here. Yes, it’s a bit out of date. I realise I’ve broken the golden rule of blogging by admitting that it is out of date (never admit this, never open a blog saying “Hey, sorry about the delay”, make everybody think everything is entirely on schedule) but you’ll have to take my word that I’m about to do something about it.

And we’re done. That feels better! I thought it was time to relay the foundation and reiterate the basics, a spot of late spring cleaning. And now, content:

Ten thousand hours and one million words

There’s a theory that to be come an expert at anything – from playing chess to painting landscapes to repairing motorcyles to becoming one of the world’s most powerful CEOs – you need to invest 10,000 hours in it, or in the preparation for it. That’s a heck of a lot of time, and for a typical writer who holds down a day job and can only write in discreet blocks of time in the evenings and weekends, that might represent more than a decade of slog. I do actually believe in the 10,000 hours rule, but the reality of it is enough to make you weep into your cocoa.

Perhaps a better measure is wordcount. I’m not going to get into the argument of wordcount being a mechanical measurement that doesn’t fit with the art of writing – sometimes you just have to be practical, and in terms of measuring raw output, it works.

Stephen King said you have to write one million words before you get to the good stuff. Now, I tend to believe what he says, and it’s certainly obvious that the more you write, the better you get. I’ve seen that in my own work. It’s just practice. And there’s where wordcount is useful, because a raw wordcount includes the good and the bad. You may write 10,000 words, and they may all be the wrong ones, but that’s 10,000 words from which you should have learnt something. Practice, practice, practice.

One million words is also much less daunting than ten thousand hours, at least for me. One million words is, theoretically, ten novels. Ten novels is, theoretically, a couple of years of work. I’m not saying it’s a short cut, far from it, but based on my daily wordcount, that’s how it lies.

So how do I stack up? If I want to “get to the good stuff”, as King says, how far have I come, and how far do I have to go? Let’s add it up:

Short fiction

The Devil in Chains (Pantechnicon): 24,052
The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery (Hub Magazine): 6,416
Forevermore (Angry Robot World House competition): 375
The Nightmare of You and Death in the Room (Hub magazine [forthcoming]): 512
Unnannounced anthology story: 2,033

Novels

Dark Heart: 118,719
Seven Wonders: 111,533
Empire State: 100,585
Ludmila, My Love (current work-in-progress): 70,236

Grand total: 434,461 words

…which is actually better than I thought. So, nearly half-way there.

But does that mean what I’ve written so far isn’t good?

Not at all. The Devil in Chains, Tobias Thackery and Nightmare were good enough for an editor to buy. Forevermore was good enough to win a competition. Sure, my novels are unpublished, but I’ve got plans for them all, and the solicited feedback so far has been Snoopy-dance positive.

But it’s all practice, practice, practice. When I hit the magic million, I’ll be a better writer than I was at 434,461 words. In twenty years time, when I’ve written who knows how many words, I’ll be a much better writer than I was at 1,000,000. That’s the way at goes. Stephen King’s advice is good, but like all writing advice, it’s more about demonstrating a reality than lecturing you on a mechanical process. The only way to get better is to write more, and if you’re serious about the craft and you’re serious about the business, then you have to write one heck of a lot of words.

Which is what I should be doing, right now!

Over at Dark Fiction review, I talk about her 2007 werewolf novella, Dreadful Skin.

Enjoy!