Just as a warning, I am coming to you from a very fancy chair after having spent two hours studying Hamlet, so forgive me if I become overly philosophical.
It's no secret - actually it's kind of a point of pride - that I spent 5+ years writing The Scientist, and that I have had the characters nattering away in my head since I was thirteen years old. So while writing and editing the book was massively challenging and wild and beyond anything I ever expected, I grew to hold a certain level of comfort with the characters.
It's also no secret that when The Scientist started to grate on my patience, and when I found myself unable to face it with the necessary creativity and enthusiasm, I dared to start writing something new. That something new is actually my second novel. So about 2 years ago, I jotted down the first few thousand words of what would eventually become These Are The Gates. Obviously, those few thousand words were terrible, and they exist now only in the dreaded "first draft" folder on my laptop. But I don't think it was just the "first draft-ness" of those words that made them terrible. It was mostly the fact that I had spent over 3 years writing from one perspective - Grace's. So to venture into the head of a character who is wildly different was terrifying and seemingly impossible. So I held back, and I softened a character who I needed to be sharp.
The benefit of that experience, other than getting something new down on paper, was that it kicked me up the backside in terms of writing The Scientist again. For a while, I bounced between stories, probably until about six months before The Scientist was published, wherein I devoted all of my attention to that.
The Scientist has been published over a month now, and while I have written some of These Are The Gates, I've found it uncomfortable at best and terrible at worst. I'm a worrier by nature, so the idea that I couldn't write in any other voice than Grace's sent me into an earth shattering panic. How can I have a career as a novelist and only write one book? I guess the answer is obvious: Don't just write one book. Be brave enough to let the characters from The Scientist settle, pass them on to those who are willing to allow them into their imagination. Don't compare Grace to Alice (the narrator of TATG). Most importantly: Don't stop writing, you silly moo.
So that's what I'm going to do. As of right now, I have exactly 60,000 words of a new novel. It still needs a lot of work, and colossal amounts of editing and refining, but right now I'm feeling pretty good about it. Tomorrow morning I'll probably change my mind and tell myself that it's a poor attempt at starting something new, but right now, I'm feeling positive.
Just a few thoughts.
