Here’s a quick guide to the pitfalls, disasters and learning I gathered on the long road to publishing Accent Reds.

1 – Wait five years

Well, I do have excuses. Anyone who knows me will know that I had a major life event just before Club Med was published where my younger brother died unexpectedly. This was awful in every way of course, but to complicate matters, he had lived in Germany most of his life, and to put it the kindest way possible, he didn’t have much of a contingency in place for any sudden departure.

And so, after managing to get myself into place where I could write regularly, instead I found myself spending a large part of the next three years navigating unhelpful lawyers, epic bureaucracy, and the obnoxious German tax and legal systems, every part of which seemed to work together to make things more impossible. Basically a stressful, intrusive and time consuming job. Although who am I kidding, I’m still dealing with some of them five years later. Yes, Deutsche Bank, I’m looking at you.

Anyway, Club Med was released in May 2020. I began writing the un-named (at that point) sequel that July. The first time I remember working on it for a long period was on the ferry to Holland, bound for Germany, having paid for onboard Wi-Fi, only to find that it didn’t work anyway. (That was to become a theme with my whole German experience). What I was working on was the first scene in Berlin, which had been inspired by an outrageously smoky bar I’d been to in Leipzig earlier that year.

2 – Write a Monster

However, back home, having started with only a few vague scenes in my head, things began to flow. And luckily, I didn’t have to backtrack or abandon ideas too often. The manuscript took about ten months to get into a good, readable place, although what I ended up with was massive: about 220k words. Basically unpublishable if it was going to be done independently due to  printing costs, and also (apparently) readers’ reluctance to read enormous books. Unless they’re about swords and dragons and stuff.

There wasn’t much of it I could ditch if I wanted the story to flow as it did, so the next best thing was to look for a place where I thought I could throw in a coda but still tell what felt like a satisfying story. That place ended up being right after the scenes in the Pentlands. It felt like anyone reading it would probably need a breather after that anyway.

So, the first third of that monster sequel became Accent Reds. About 78K words long, a respectable size for a book, about twice the length of Club Med. And over the next year or so, even with constant German ‘challenges’ and other life stuff, I worked the hell out of those words.

There was an upside though, the remainder of that first word-monster, i.e., the next book, is already written and in a decent place edit-wise. That book is now The Fear Aesthetic, and that should be out later this year. (By the way, there will be at least two more books in the series after number three, I wrote part of the fourth book while I was waiting on my editor doing their thing.)

It was draft nine before I didn’t think I could get it any better by myself. But of course, there are other professional people who can help with those next stages…

So what’s the lesson here? Well, it’s all a all bit vague really. Plan to get your book to the best place as you can as quickly as possible. But none of the things that derailed me could have been avoided, so don’t be too hard on yourself if life knocks you down and keeps kicking you just for the hell of it. Writing can be a useful escape and great for mental health, but you have to take care of your family and yourself first.

Stay tuned for how ‘not’ to commission a cover next.