Writing Around Everything Else

One of the things I've found particularly encouraging since publishing Certified in Sounding Official has been discovering just how many people in my professional network have a creative side that I knew little or nothing about.

There are other authors, artists, people involved in narration and audio, and quite a few people developing creative projects alongside their main careers.

I've enjoyed discovering that, probably because I'm now doing much the same thing myself.

I still work full time in cybersecurity, so writing tends to happen around everything else.

Evenings. Weekends. Occasionally a note made when something occurs to me at a particularly inconvenient moment.

There isn't really a separate writing life where everything else stops for a while.

It fits into the gaps.

What has changed is that I now have one published novel and other projects at different stages behind it.

Finishing the first book also changed my perspective on the process.

Before publication, most of what happens to a novel is largely invisible.

There is the initial idea, which is usually much less complete than it feels at the time.

Then there are the things that work immediately, the things that definitely don't, characters who become more important than expected, scenes that disappear completely and details that send you down research routes you hadn't anticipated.

Eventually, after rather more revision than you imagined when you started, there is something resembling a finished book.

And then everyone sees the finished version.

I realised that, apart from mentioning a book when it is completed or available, I had shared very little about everything that happens between those two points.

How ideas develop.

What changes along the way.

What turns out not to work.

The research.

And what I'm learning from trying to fit writing around a fairly normal working life.

So I thought I'd occasionally share a little more of that here.

Nothing too relentless.

Those with absolutely no interest in how novels get put together can consider this fair warning.

It isn't intended to become a constant stream of book promotion. There will still inevitably be some of that when there is something worth mentioning.

But I'm increasingly interested in the process itself: where ideas come from, the things I'm working on and some of the subjects that keep finding their way into the fiction.

It has also been a useful reminder that the professional version of somebody is rarely the complete one.

Apparently quite a few of us go home and do something entirely different.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.