After the success of writing and launching my first novel, The Beast, the obvious thing to do was to jump straight back into writing the next book in the planned trilogy. Which is exactly what I did. For the first few months, the story flowed out of my imagination and onto the page, but something was not right in my head. Something else was nagging at my brain calling for attention.
The Beast was a book that I had spent months thinking about, plotting out the story, writing and editing. Then it had become so much more than it had started as. The story went well beyond what I had planned and it just kept coming. Book 2 began that way, but I began to stumble. I pontificated more than I wrote and became frustrated with my progress.
I had a little brain itch that just would not go away.
My writing began when I was young. I always loved making up stories. Playing imaginative games with Star Wars figures under my bed, running around the house with a Zoro cape on and a hobby horse my mum had made for me. I have always enjoyed reading and count myself as a world-class daydreamer. Eventually, this led me to start writing my own songs as a teenager and on rare occasions to write short stories.
During the long, lonely hours sitting behind the till in my party shop in Brighton on a Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, when customers seemed to be just a distant weekend memory, I would sit and play computer games and be transported to different worlds and have to plan strategic battles. Sometimes I would read. Sometimes I began to dabble in writing. ( One day I will finish the story of a man who is blinded in a car accident and has to try to find his way back to his family…)
Along the journey of life, things got in the way, I was in a band, I changed jobs… many times. I fell in and out of love, got married, had children. Then came divorce and life seemed on hold for a while.
Eventually, I fell in love again. With my now wife, with work, with a house. I took up new hobbies and sports and writing had become a forgotten pastime.
During the first lockdown, I started to play D&D with friends online. This led to a rekindling of writing as the other players and I took turns each week to write up our adventures, trying to outdo each other in our inventiveness.
I decided to write a novel and the product of that is available to buy on Amazon, ‘The Beast’ was born.
I was not stuck with writer’s block, but something else was tugging at my imagination.
For a while, we had been playing a role-playing game called Monster of the Week. My son was running the sessions and it was very different to D&D. I had been writing up the adventure each week but was struggling with work and writing book 2, so I started to record our sessions, so I could write them up later. This became more of a – so I could not write them and just forget about them – situation.
This was what was niggling at my head. This was what was stopping me from writing the book I was supposed to be writing.
I was out walking the dog with my son one weekend and chatting about ideas for stories and I admitted to him that I was struggling. He asked me what I wanted to write. I didn’t know. So I spent a few days ignoring the issue and fumbled my way through a few more chapters. Then it hit me. I could write two books at the same time.
Brilliant.
No. It was terrible.
Book two was getting more and more ragged around the edges and my feeble attempt at writing up the entirety of our monster of the week adventure was dribble.
Another walk in the woods with my son and the decision was made. Just write one book well.
I started writing book 2 of The Beast again. Leviathan. I got nowhere. The bug was in my head and would not stop wriggling.
I stopped writing Leviathan.
I started writing what was provisionally called – The things they did to kill a monster.
To start off with it was easy. I had lived this as one of the characters, I had notes and pieces of story already written. Then I ran out of notes and had to slog my way through hours, and hours, and hours of video. Pausing, rewinding, rewatching, typing, pausing, rewinding, rewatching, typing. It was relentlessly dull to get through. However, I was determined. I had put off writing another book to get this one done and had a duty to myself to see it through.
Whilst walking this path I realised that the story did not work the way that we had played it, heavy editing was needed to make the story accessible to readers who had not been there. This was the fun part, cutting out the boring bits and adding some writing glue straight from the imagination. Soon enough I had the first draft done.
I started writing Leviathan again and realised that now I had released the inner demon, the story was flowing. I edited and edited The things they did to kill a monster. I started to release chapters on Patreon (a failed attempt at gaining an audience).
I wrote the first draft of Leviathan.
My father read a copy of The things they did to Kill a monster. He gave me some crucial feedback from a reader’s point of view and the story went back into editing mode. Characters were cut out; scenes were changed and the story began to feel like a novel. (I even wrote a prequel, set in wartime Nazi Germany)
Quick as that, I was sitting with two finished novels. Leviathan became ‘The Messenger: Book Two of The Beast, The Messenger and The King’ and The things they did to kill a monster became ‘Tales from the Slaughtered Lamb’.
Which one should I release first?
I decided to try out something new on my audience, perhaps gain a few new readers from a different genre. I gave a copy of Tales from the Slaughtered Lamb to the person in the world whom I trust the most, my wife.
She is a brilliant editor and the book transformed again under her scrupulous eye, becoming what it is today. A book that I hope you will enjoy.
‘Tales from the Slaughtered Lamb’ is available now for Kindle and in paperback from Amazon.
https://storyoriginapp.com/universalbooklinks/7019709a-3dcf-11ee-94e6-0f5540bb5757
Steven M Phillips Author 