Big Feelings, Big Edits and One Last Big Push. The End Of Revisions and What I've Been Up To The Last Six Months.

You reach a point - and writers know it well - where you have absolutely no idea what you’ve written anymore.

I don’t mean the crunching moments of self doubt that we all have (I mean it! All of us) but an entirely more all-engulfing sense of exhaustion. Just this feeling of…I don’t know.

I don’t know if it’s good. I don’t know if it makes sense. I don’t know if anyone was worthwhile.

And then suddenly, at 9PM on Tuesday night, after seven hours of work trying to get ‘Some Advanced Notes On Practical Dreaming’ ready to send to my lovely editors one last time, I could see straight again. I knew.

I’d been working on the most important - and my favourite - chapter in the entire book. I was exhausted and flagging and just sort of letting Spotify shuffle through anything that felt vaguely right. And I can’t really describe what happened next. I was listening to this mashup of Phoebe Bridger’s ‘Waiting Room’ and Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’. And at the exact perfect moment, the moment that summed up every single part of Sam’s arc and every single thing that she had gone through so far, at the exact moment that her emotional story pivoted, the chorus hit.

And maybe it was the exhaustion or the fact that my left hand is now basically fucked but everything just make sense. I knew I’d written the book I always meant to write. I knew I’d said something good and true. That the whole journey had been worth it all along.

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Let’s take a journey back in time. You might remember that I wrote the first draft of the book in 2021. I was 2022, it was the second ever book I ever finished and I had a lot of sort of very big high concept ideas of what writing should be, what a book could be. It was probably the most inspired and interesting creative period of my life, even if I was still very inexperienced. I had a long summer between finishing uni and starting grad school, we were still mostly in lockdown and I was lucky to have time and time and time to pour into a book that at first was meant to be just a fun, high concept romp.

I loved writing that book. And it was so fun! But I knew, before I even got to send it to betas, that it lacked emotional stakes and that the characterisations were all quite flat.

So I went back to the drawing board. And back. And back again.

I spoke on Mikayla Kimes’ Pen to Pod podcast about the way I stumbled onto the book’s wider themes of mental illness, trauma and female rage quite organically. They became a kind of backbone to the work, an allegory that worked perfectly with the plot I’d already had in mind and gave the book enough added depth that when I did send it to betas none of them found the finished book as shallow as earlier versions had been.

That was the draft I queried, that I entered into mentorship programs, that got so much kind feedback from industry professionals. It’s the draft I was intending to publish when I made the decision that it was indie, and not traditional, publishing that was really calling my name.

But, even though I never quite admitted it to myself, I still wasn’t happy. I knew the book was good. Maybe even very good? But it would itch away in my brain sometimes, the thought that it could perhaps have been something more.

I had touched, I knew, on bigger themes. But I hadn’t dug into them. I hadn’t gotten messy. I had pulled back before things got too raw, before I accidentally showed - through the characters, through the prose, through the twist and then of the story - too much of my self.

I’m such a chronic oversharer now that it’s sometimes stunning, even to me, that that hasn’t always been the case. For most of my teenage years I was told, pretty resolutely, that my struggles with anxiety and an ED weren’t things people really wanted to hear about. Add in a toxic relationship, a toxic friendship…it’s amazing the way you learn to keep your trap shut.

I skimmed the surface in the earlier drafts of Dreamers and I knew it, to some degree.

When the time came to start getting the book ready for publication I knew I was going to have to give it a quick spruce up anyway. It’s only natural that my prose in 2024 was miles ahead of what I could pull off in 2021, so it made sense to go back through the manuscript and tighten things up where I could. But the more I went through the book the more I knew that the prose was fine…the changes I wanted to make were deeper, bigger.

And thus began what was meant to be one month and became six of drawing out those bigger themes of the book; pushing on them, heightening them, making edits and cuts and changes until it became a darker, fiercer thing.

It will always be, I know, one of the coolest things I’ve ever done with my writing. I cannot imagine a steeper learning curve or levelling up as quickly as I have if I’d done things any other way.

But oh the self doubt. Oh the exhaustion.

And so here we find ourselves again. Back at the desk, back in front of the big computer. 9pm on a Tuesday night, left hand cramping and unusable. Sure at last that it had all been worth it.

And getting to write ‘the end’ one last time.

There’s so much to come with this book. So many exciting moments and opportunities. There’s the ARC contest. The cover reveal on February 28th. Pre order campaigns, ARCS. Release day itself. Whatever comes next.

But that one moment. That one, long awaited feeling of clarity.

That will be hard to beat.