updates of late

At long last my poor neglected Substack and everything else in my life that’s been cast to the wayside are regaining the love and attention that they deserve. My manuscript, in all of its absolutely immense glory, has been sent away for a final round of edits. 

After being rewritten almost four times, it has managed the remarkable feat of ending up precisely 306 words longer than Manacled. Which would be around 1100 pages in a standard US hardcover. My enabling friends have assured me that some people want books that can be used to provide both emotional and physical trauma, but I suspect that in a few weeks it will be coming back with the gentle but stern instructions to take a scalpel to my prose and endeavour to become at least fifty thousand words less verbose. (Beyond the impracticality of a book that size, I know the manuscript needs one final transmutation before it is sent onward for copyedits and typesetting.)

For now, I wanted to finally give an update on what the last year has been like.

This writing journey has been quite the transformation for me and involved many months of contemplating the distinctions between fannish and original work, as well as the different structural and story-telling techniques utilised in serialised work vs a trilogy vs a standalone.

Manacled, having been completed for four years now, has many recent readers who tend to go into the story with the expectation of it reading like a sort of novel, not understanding that it was written and published as weekly or biweekly serial chapters. Because of this, it structurally has more in common with a three season TV drama than a typical standalone novel. There were many different requirements for its chapters, including a certain amount of necessary repetition (although I admit to a bit of Dickensian word-count padding to try to make the chapters clock in at a semi-consistent length). 

In my interview with Maddie Ellis at Today.com (which you can read here) I talked about how finding the right moral dilemma was my starting point for reworking the story. This actually all started with a conversation I had with a friend about organ donation. From there, I started thinking about necromancy and the ethics of what happens to a body after one dies. That concept gave me an idea of what kind of world I wanted to build, and ultimately the direction I wanted the story to go in.

One of the first challenges I encountered was finding the right balance in developing worldbuilding large and sound enough to support the existing plot, but not so elaborate that it would take precedence or overshadow the fundamental story. It was also important to me not to write something riddled with suspiciously bludger-sized holes, welded over with conveniently generic fantasy substitutes. I wanted the reimagining to be fully built around the new concepts, and to let the story diverge where necessary.

I find that my creative work happens best when I know the direction I want to go in and then give myself a sufficiently large pool of information from which to draw inspiration. These ideas then sit within my mind, simmering like a primordial soup from which a story may spring forth. In the case of Alchemised, that meant starting with a deep dive into the history and philosophy of alchemy, anthropology, and medicine, etc. until the right ingredients were in place and I had the resources to fully conceptualise what I wanted.   

This does mean that a lot more information and ideas go into the soup than can be included in the final cut of any story. When I had enough inspiration to draw from, the restructuring process began and the initial redraft resulted in a trilogy-length series. 

A trilogy, I think, would have been the most indulgent way to rework the story because it would have let me keep all my darlings and flex the unhinged amount of research I did. I would have been able to go wild with my worldbuilding history and subplots, but I was somewhat worried about the expansion undermining the fundamental story. However, I assumed that most publishing companies would prefer a trilogy over a brick-sized standalone, so, trilogy-shaped outline in hand, off I went on submission. 

It was astonishingly gratifying that Del Rey—whom had 1) already been on my short list of preferred publishers, and 2) was already well-acquainted with Manacled and its unconventional structural elements—immediately agreed that Alchemised would be better served as a standalone, even if that meant printing an absolute unit of a book. This is not to say that cinching my newfound plot/cast/worldbuilding into standalone dimensions didn’t cause me some deep moments of grievance, but we made it. (Almost.)

I have to admit that structurally reworking the entire story THREE times was not what I had in mind when this journey started, but having gone through all the iterations, I do think each phase was vital to the story’s evolution, much in the same way that chrysopoeia (the transmutation of gold) also requires many steps. 

I don’t know that I’ve ended up with gold any more than any historical alchemists ever did, but on a technical level I feel like having to reconceptualise the same thing in so many different forms has given me a much deeper sense of it and my own capacity as a writer. It’s sort of like one of those writing exercises where you write the same scene in three different POVs, except it’s ‘write a 300k+ word story in three distinct formats on a deadline.’

It’s a good thing I enjoy writing as much as I do. 

In the last eight months, I think I’ve transmuted almost as much as Alchemised has. We’ve gone through blackening, whitening, yellowing, and I suspect copy-edits will be the reddening. (I apologise in advance for the amount of alchemy and necromancy puns I will be uttering for the foreseeable future.)

Many people have been very curious about the kind of new world they’re getting, and I’m so torn because I want to chatter about it and tell you everything, but I also want to leave it alone and let readers discover and interpret it all themselves rather than go in with my dictates about the how and the why of things.

I know there’s a great deal of speculation about what’s different and what’s the same and how can I possibly remove [XYZ] without the entire story collapsing? But ironically a lot of the things assumed to be impossible were some of the easiest changes, and the most consistently difficult point of divergence was coping with the loss of magical transportation. I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to invent a compelling excuse for why alchemists or necromancers could have teleportation abilities, because what do you mean I now have to figure out ways for them to efficiently traverse distances every time they go anywhere?  

Henceforth all future characters I write shall be able to teleport for Reasons. 

What I can say for now is that the bones of the story are much the same, but as with any story with an entirely new sociological and supernatural world and new characters and new inciting events, despite sharing the same plot’s rhythmic broad strokes, some changes to those bones were necessary. Sometimes, to survive, an arm just has to go. 

None of the significant changes were taken lightly because they quite simply couldn’t be; due to the unconventional structure, changing anything involved thinking through all the ramifications, both past and present, before commencing. Sometimes, generally, that was fine, but sometimes 100k words later I’d find that one of my butterflies had caused a tsunami, and several of my characters or key events had drowned in it. For a story without any time travelling in it, I must say I managed to create a remarkable number of paradoxes.

I was as surgical as I could be with my cuts and alterations, and while some of the changes made me quite wistful, now that I’m finally standing on the other side of the process, I’m actually very glad that Manacled will retain some aspects as uniquely belonging to it and which will remain solely with the readers who have loved and supported it in its original form.

I hope to update this Substack more often in the coming months. I have a few different posts I want to write about some of my giant stack of reference books and inspiration, and various thoughts about writing and storycraft that I had over the last several months that I hope to share. 

I have also been receiving a lot of questions on all fronts for the last few months, and I know I’ve lost track of them while trying to stay focused on the manuscript. I can’t promise to answer every question because **spoilers** but I think an FAQ post could be in order for any big-ticket inquiries that lots of people want to know, so feel free to drop any you have in the comments. 

I’m looking forward to sharing more of this journey with you all, and soon Alchemised itself.