First Efforts

Okay, story time. I’d like to tell you one from my repertoire.

This happened quite a few years back now. 2012 to be precise and OJ Lowe goes by the long form of his name at that point. He’s still at Bradford University and he proceeds to go in early, drink coffee in front of a PC before lectures and work on his first ever attempt at writing book. I’d previously written fanfiction, I think I still did at that point, I’d always wanted to write a book and I’d thought why not. How hard can it be?

What was the book about? Well, I drew on a lot of experiences from around me at the time. I was playing a lot of Fable 2 and 3 on the Xbox, I’d recently been watching Life on Mars and the spinoff series Ashes to Ashes and well, I’d recently read Game of Thrones over the summer. And then, as every writer who ultimately wishes to write a fantasy novel always had to remember, there’s Tolkien. You can’t escape John Ronald Reul’s gaze. In hindsight, it was probably a mess. There were all sorts of stock fantasy clichés in there, largely on account of my not knowing any better. We had evil barons, good and evil and the eternal struggle between them, helpless heroines being rescued by dashing men with magic silver swords, we had multi-coloured Nazgul, as well as roaming rowdy travellers on quadbikes. And guns. (This was before I’d read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, but not a heck of a long time before.) I had ideas for a twenty book series and how it’d develop. I finished it, forty-odd chapters, some two-hundred and twenty thousand words and then what did I do?

I started to rework it. I took out the Life of Mars influences, and threw in influences from Star Wars and Highlander, I’d never seen anything similar done in fantasy regarding protagonists crossing worlds before (my reading wasn’t as in-depth perhaps as it is now and with hindsight, it almost certainly had elements of the LitRPG genre.) Even the title I wasn’t sure about. The Baron’s Rule wasn’t the catchy hook I wanted. I had several goes at rewrites, eventually abandoned the project after eighteen months of work, as far as I’m aware, it still lies dormant on my laptop. The only reason it won’t let me delete it is because it’s been on there that long now, it’s considered part of its core programming.

Okay, no, not really. But was the effort wasted? I wouldn’t say so. I’d say it gave me experience of what it’s like to write that amount of words. I’d say it gave me the experience of working around a busy schedule. I’d say it told me when to give something up as a bad job. Nothing you ever write is wasted. Unless you write anecdotes on toilet paper. Then it just goes down the pan. Literally. It’s unlikely I’ll ever take the step and try to re-release it, especially not since some elements wound up in the Spirit Callers Saga which in itself, has a story about the writing of it I might share on day.

Let’s take another example of something I will use again. I worked on something which underwent the title of Spirit and Stone in the end, an urban fantasy novel. (I’m not going into details about the plot because well, it’s currently the title of the third Novisarium book and borrows much of the plot. So THAT wasn’t wasted. Same story again. I was unemployed for a bit and spent my afternoons writing this book. Then once again, I reached the end, having written it in third person… and realised most urban fantasy was written in the first. Talk about peer pressure and a bad example to break. I didn’t want to be THAT guy. I think for new authors, there’s expectations and I didn’t want to be judged as the guy who broke urban fantasy’s most scared covenant. I’ve since realised nobody truly gives a crap, as long as it’s a good book, reasonably formatted and no frequent, obvious spelling mistakes, but I was younger then and in awe of this world which felt so far away from me. I putted around the idea of the world for a long time, the idea did eventually evolve into the Novisarium series, the story of the city between cities where supernaturals roam the streets, exiled from Earth.

I’ve tried many other bits and pieces, comedy-horror, action thriller, superhero fantasy, outright comedy and yet I keep getting drawn back to fantasy. Weird huh? Always my first love, it would appear, the first movie I remember watching is Star Wars and I think it affected me more than anyone could have seen at the time.

Last year, I took the plunge and indie published after several false starts with books, several times I queried and got nowhere. (Let’s not talk about what’s happened since with said first book The Great Game. That’s a story both for another day and told repeatedly on social media, mainly by me to anyone who’ll listen.) I guess I’ve realised the truth is, everything prepares you, some of it’s useful, some of it’s a warning what not to do, but every word written is better than nothing.

As the saying goes, you can’t edit a blank page but you can polish a turd and occasionally you might find gold.

Nothing is wasted. Even if you write a thousand pages of crap, it prepares you better than the person who wrote nothing. Does not a sword gain its reputation by being used? The pen is the same.

Thanks for reading.

OJ.