Start At B - Announcing 'Penny Keeps the Keys and Other Stories'

As a writer, there are some bits of advice you get so often you can sort of stop listening before the sentence is over.

Well - no. You get advice so often you can't help stopping listening.

"Write what you know" is a good one, which I've long suspected is the battle cry of the Anti Science Fiction Battalion.

"Just write every day" is another, and I used to be a huge believer in it until I found my whole life upended and discovered that it's the kind of rule that's great while it works - but instantly makes me feel rotten when I fail to meet it. 

And even though part of my brain seems wired to treat writing femdom and denial as a kind of delightful self-care, I've never managed to write every day, particularly not in recent months! 

But not all advice to writers is bad, and honestly I think a lot of advice to writers - like books themselves - can be fantastic at the right time, and for the right audience. ("Write what you know," for instance, can produce some incredible realism in relationships. Including in femdom, as it happens...)

Anyway, another piece of advice, and one which always has resonated with me fairly well, is "you can't edit a blank page".

And - yes - it's perhaps a little obvious. Nobody could deny there's a huge difference between 

A) "......"

And 

B) "He gasped as she pressed closer and began to stroke him" 

Obviously if the end goal after a lot of editing and rereading and biting your own lip is to get to a finished and polished version of that moment - say, one that goes

"The feeble protest died in his throat; even his heart seemed to stop as she pressed closer, the weight of her breast immobilising his arm against his side as her fingers slipped beneath the waistband of his jeans and curled against his shaft, stroking softly"

...then it's much much easier to secure that final version if you start by editing B, not A. 

Where I suspect that advice of being too pat, though, is that, well... All writers start with A. That's the point. 

Editing, at least for me, isn't quite so much writing, as... Picky reading. Checking the ideas I set down with a single shaking hand still hold up when properly examined. And with my eyes fully open. 

And often it's selectively picky reading in which I can angst for days about the precise structure and opening of a sentence without ever noticing the glaring mistake I introduced to the paragraph three edits ago. 

But, even so, editing can be much easier. And, being both a picky reader and a picky writer, I have a lot of cast offs cluttering up my laptop, and quite a few rough drafts on typewritten sheets: it's amazing how you feel whether an idea is working when you're trying to convey it through the stiff keys of a grumpy typewriter. 

I haven't been writing much lately. 

But I have genuinely missed writing, on a fairly fundamental level. So it occurred to me that rather than try to get from A to B while my brain didn't want to write, I could perhaps just... Start at B, and make it better.

And so rather than force blank pages into rough drafts, I turned my hand to converting rough drafts into actual stories. Starts of novels that didn't go anywhere or scenes that I wrote and could never quite anchor into a broader narrative could, I realised, be edited into completeness on their own merits.

Of course, not all my abandoned drafts got as far as B. Some had failed far earlier than that - but all of them were at least... A and a half. 

And I knew I could get them shaped into something genuinely satisfying by revising them. Perhaps by polishing what was already there, but sometimes rethinking ideas entirely: cutting away the scaffolding that I'd thought would support a longer narrative, and letting the core dynamics stretch as long as their internal structure let them.

For a few stories, that meant reshaping existing material; in others it meant rounding off an ending instead of working out how the cliffhanger went; in one case it meant taking a single vague premise and transforming it entirely into an extremely cathartic dig at insurers...

...and I've ended up with something that could, I think, serve as a genuine taster of what I do, more in the style of The Birthday Present and Other Stories than my standalone novels or novellas. 

Partly I'm aware that I want to get something published to remind myself I can still do this and to get back to something more normal after a frankly awful few months. But also... 

...some of those scenes were genuinely excellent. I just never wrote the rest of the book. 

I’m wary of over-framing this as a “return to writing,” because that suggests a kind of break or absence that doesn’t quite match my experience. It wasn’t that my writing stopped. It was that only a certain kind of writing remained possible, and that turned out to be the writing required for claims forms. 

I think it's about time I stopped always having to write I used to have x and I want it again and got back to writing proper, enjoyable things, in which someone other than me is the person explaining I used to get to x and now I may never x again!, and in pleasingly whimpering tones.

And so - as I wait for the latest batch of claims forms to be returned with yet another irritating quibble and a request for more information - I've brought out a fresh collection of short fiction. 

It's called Penny Keeps the Keys and Other Stories, it includes one tale explicitly designed to help the layperson understand how insurance companies really operate*, and it's available now. I hope you'll enjoy it.

*at least, how I assume they must be operating. I can't think of another explanation.