Hindsight is a wonderful, slightly painful thing. Looking back at the version of me who had just had his first book published, there’s plenty I’d quietly tell him, if I could get a message through. Since I can’t, I’ll put it here instead, for anyone else approaching that same milestone.

“The Editing Never Really Stops”

I genuinely thought that, before that first publication, there’d be a moment when the work was simply done, full stop, forever. There isn’t. Read, revise, edit, wash, rinse, repeat doesn’t end when the book goes out into the world — it just changes shape, becoming about the next thing instead. In other words, as long as you keep writing, you’re going to have to keep editing. It will just be on other works.

Years ago, I came across a quote from a well-known author whose name I can’t remember: he had never finished writing a book in his life. He would continually fiddle with it, keeping it in a state of perpetual revision. Finally, his wife and agent would take it away from him and publish it.

“You’ll Worry About the Wrong Things”

I spent an inordinate amount of energy worrying about things that, in hindsight, mattered very little, and almost none on things that turned out to matter a great deal. I won’t pretend I could have predicted which was which at the time; that’s rather the nature of hindsight, but I wish someone had at least warned me that the ratio would be so lopsided.

I used to worry about the size and length of my stories. For instance, when I began Opener of the Ways, I thought I might end up with a short book, maybe 50-60,000 words. As I wrote, and the number and length of the chapters grew, I realised that I have the opposite problem. The book is extremely long. I am already at 147,000 words, and suspect I have another 30-40,000 to go. That is an epic; I now have to think about how to split it into two or three parts, which is not easy given the flow of the story. Cliffhangers exist, but they are unsatisfactory points to end a book at.

Things I did not worry about enough included:

• The best way to make submissions;
• Working with editors and others at the publishers;
• Marketing.

I’ve learned differently since then. Nowadays, I let the story be the length it wants to be; that can be anything from 100 words to the aforementioned possibly 180,000. In the meantime, I’m blogging as part of my marketing campaign. 

“Not Everyone Will Read It the Way You Meant It”

This one took some getting used to. You spend months, sometimes years, inside a story, knowing exactly what you meant by every choice. Readers don’t have access to any of that. They bring their own life experiences and reading to it, and sometimes that reading is wildly different from yours. That’s not a failure on anyone’s part; it’s just what happens once a story leaves your hands.

The prime example of this is an as-yet unpublished story titled Cracks, a Lovecraftian tale that doesn’t directly reference any of his well-known tropes. I wrote it as a story about a self-described “gatekeeper” whose self-imposed task is to prevent monsters from sneaking through the eponymous cracks in reality.

I gave it to someone to read, and he came back and said he reckoned it was about a mentally disturbed man stalking a younger person.

WTF?

In NLP, there is a presupposition that goes, “The meaning of your communication is the response it elicits.” I can tell you right now, I still can’t see that message or meaning in that story!

“The Win Doesn’t Quiet the Muse”

I half expected that getting something properly published would somehow settle things, prove the point, and quiet the relentless need to keep producing more. It didn’t. If anything, the Muse took it as confirmation she’d been right all along and doubled down. I’m not particularly complaining, just noting that I hadn’t expected it. It’s the reason my output has more than doubled since then.

“You’re Allowed to Enjoy It”

This is the one I’d emphasise most if I could send only one message back. I was so busy being anxious about getting everything right the first time that I didn’t always pause to enjoy the genuinely remarkable fact that I’d finally done something I’d wanted to do for over half a century. I’d tell my younger self: slow down, just for a moment, and actually enjoy this. The next book will still be there waiting. And the next…!