The book, the backstory, the question, and my hopes.
I have grown a habit without plan or forethought, of posting on/around each new book’s publication with my thoughts on what that particular book means to me and where it came from. For Mother Sea, that post was an explanation of the content warnings for the book, for The Last To Drown it was about the experience of writing chronic pain and the craft of novella writing.
With the publication of We Are All Ghosts In The Forest this week, I have been attacked by a fit of the pensives again and wanted to do the same for this book. Because the weird thing about publishing multiple books is that each one somehow means something unique to you. It’s important to you in an entirely different way to your previous (and likely next) books. Which when I type it, sounds perfectly reasonable, but I don’t know – I think a part of me was under the impression that publishing books would become … not rote because obviously each book is unique, but that the act of publication at least would become familiar and comfortable. Like wearing different outfits every day but then slipping into the same coat to go out.
And yes, there are aspects of the publication hullabaloo that feel very different (mostly less fraught) than they did the first time round simply because we’ve been here before. But Ghosts does have its own new territory to break, both personally and professionally, and I guess that’s where I’m gonna go with this publication day (weekend) waffle. Alongside a lot of shiny promo graphics that my fab publicity person sent me & I can’t resist using!
Craft, learning and lockdown.
One of my writer hopes is that each new book I embark on will teach me something new about writing. It’ll push me in a slightly different direction – whether that’s in genre or subject matter, form or voice – so that with every project I am challenging myself to grow as a writer. I aspire to be braver at this, if I’m honest with you, to be bolder in leaping into things I’m not sure I can pull off, more fearless (or unhinged, your choice) in being willing to tear something down that’s merely ‘good enough’ and rebuild something better from the ruins.
However, that’s for the future. For Ghosts, I look at it and think that the best lesson I learned from it is to trust in the small flashes of wonder more. To not get stalled on ‘yes but how does that work’ until the editing, to leap merrily into a half-arsed shiny idea without the comfort of the usual planning I do. I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who regularly writes without a good map (of character psychology and setting at least), because that stage does feel important and enriching to me. But I think there’s real value in knowing you aren’t tied to that planning. That sometimes, when the wind and the tides are right, you just have to leap aboard, hoist sail, and see what happens.
Which is how Ghosts materialised. At least the initial shape and opening chapters.
See, the thing is, I started writing Ghosts in March 2020.
Mmm hmm. That March 2020. I had a child two terms into their first year of secondary school, just forming new friendship groups, just adjusting to this new world … then suddenly at home, isolated, with their education, friendships and world reduced to pixels.
[See where the idea of the ghosts came from? More on this below…]
Homeschooling in that first lockdown was … not brilliantly structured, so even though I had it undoubtedly easier than parents with younger children, I was still rarely getting more than 20 mins of uninterrupted time. And the vast majority of my attention, emotion, and organising capacity was being used up on my child, which left exactly zero capacity for me to do intelligent, thoughtful things like plan and research and worldbuild.
When I sat down to write Ghosts, I had the opening image in my mind – of a woman returning to a remote village with a stranger boy – in my mind and nothing else.
Two paragraphs in, I mentioned a ghost. The line is ‘There were three people on the street, two of them real’. I wrote that, thought huh, so we’ve got ghosts then, and carried on. By the end of the first chapter – and the appearance of a certain image-shifting cat – I’d realised the ghosts were the remains of the internet, that the village was in Estonia, and that Stefan, the boy, was non-verbal. All my worldbuilding, character development, and plotting began then, and it was a patchwork ad hoc affair that later required a lot (so much) patching up and weaving in of broken threads.
Without the particular circumstances of lockdown and homeschooling, I’d never have written a book with such wild absence of planning. I quite probably won’t again. But thanks to that experience, and to Ghosts as a final product being something I’m quite proud of, my relationship with planning has evolved significantly. I still spend a good amount of time exploring the imagery and layers of the book’s core theme, because that’s the lodestone upon which everything else is built. And I do still plan, but it’s much less ‘I need to know everything before I can start’ and much more ‘I need to know enough not to get too tangled while I’m finding my feet in the opening chapters.’ It’s less character arc graphs, and more floorplans! (I’ve discovered a bit of a love for floorplans with Salt Oracle and the current wip both being largely in one big, complicated building)
Is this growth? Not really. I mean, there’s no wrong or right way to do this, so my approach adjusting doesn’t mean it’s better. But I do feel like this particular change, for me, is about confidence. I trust my instincts more, I trust those flashes of wonder to guide me well; I trust that if I make an unholy mess I can (grumpily) unpick and restitch it. Let’s be honest, I will also always love a graph, but this new more relaxed approach to tackling new projects might just give me the freedom to be bolder in the next project, and the next…
Ghosts and loneliness
There’s always one question that comes up again and again with each book that gets published. One particular theme or issue that stands out enough with enough people to become a feature of most interviews or informal chats about that book. For The Last To Drown it was about the experience of writing chronic pain. For Mother Sea it was questions about the importance of climate fiction.
For Ghosts I think one is already emerging, and it’s going to be ‘Where did you get the idea for these ghosts?’. The easy answer is that scene above – me watching my child struggle through the loneliness of a life reduced to four walls and pixels on a screen. The strange thing is that lockdown wasn’t isolating for me, in fact with both my husband and daughter suddenly in the house all day every day, I lost the peace and solitude I actually relied on quite heavily to manage my chronic pain. Being housebound apart from occasional short trips out? Well, hi, welcome to my world, please tidy up after yourself. BUT it was a horrible experience for my daughter, at an awful point in her life, and watching that was heartbreaking.
The chain of thought from that to a world haunted by fragments of our digital detritus, by our online echoes, is fairly obvious. And then the rest of the world in Ghosts had to be built up around that central concept.
So if anyone reading this was wondering, there’s the answer to that particular question. Where did the ghosts come from? Loneliness and lockdown. Homeschooling, society’s fragility and resilience; most of all the search for connection.
Growth, ladders and doing the daunting things
Ghosts represents something more prosaic to me too. This is the first book in my Solaris contract, and my first book with a publisher that has Big 5 distribution and main player reach within the SFF world. All three of my publishers have been/are amazing, and in my opinion punch above their weight with the quality of their lists, but Solaris are a step into a bigger room for me, if you like.
So Ghosts feels a lot like the next rung in the ladder of my career. It’s exciting. I’m hopefully going to be reaching new audiences with this book, hopefully gaining new readers who’ll stick around for future books. I’m doing more events for Ghosts’ launch than I’ve done for all my previous books’ launches combined! And with some brilliant author friends! My fabulous marketing/publicity goddesses are helping me reach new venues and platforms too. If the reception to Ghosts is positive, that in turn will pave the way for other opportunities (foreign rights sales for Ghosts, further book deals etc).
This is all wonderful new ground to be breaking. I am extremely fond of, and proud of, Ghosts, and am excited to have it out in the world finding people it resonates with. It’s also, not gonna lie, just a teensy bit daunting. I say this because I’m leery of doing the Instagram ‘Everything is intensely wonderful actually’ thing. Several events plus travel in a month is going to be a physical test, but I’m interested to see how I cope and how quickly I recover. It’s good data for the future! There’s also the fear, of course, that no-one will show up to my events, or that everyone will hate the book and hunt me down to tell me so, or, or, or… But those are normal, unavoidable fears to have and I have an ace in my back pocket…
…I have readers. I may not have many compared to other authors, but there are amazing, strange, beautiful people who have come with me from book to book, frequently cheered me on, voted for me, recommended me to others. These readers have trusted me each time I’ve veered off in a new direction. So I trust them in turn. I trust that they’ll read Ghosts and find something worthwhile in it. And that’s kind of all that matters. Yes, I hope I reach new readers as Ghosts takes the stage. Yes, I hope it opens new doors for me and my career. But I hope even more that the readers who’ve supported me thus far will enjoy this next step on my bookish travels.
Thank you for reading & supporting this blog. I’ll be back soon on my Substack with less ‘please buy my book’ and more about what makes a good book event, parting ways with your agent, and more…
