Author: aoyebanj

E________, first draft: 37,000 words.

As Braking Day gets closer and closer to publication, the marketing folks at both DAW in the US and Jo Fletcher in the UK are asking me to pitch in by making myself available for interviews and to write pieces for blogs and websites. This, I am more than happy to do. A lot of people have put in a lot of work to make Braking Day available to the public, so the very least I can do is help make sure the public knows about it.

To that end, Ella at Jo Fletcher suggested that I might want to write a few words for the UK SF websites about how my day job is reflected in my writing. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that one of the reasons I write is to forget about my day job.

I work in counterterrorist financing, or what I tend to call financial counterterrorism because I don’t actually finance counter-terrorists. What I do, along with many others, is help the giant bank that I work for do its very best to make sure that money does not travel to or from bad people or countries. It is, after all, a lot harder to build a bomb if you can’t afford the ingredients.

It is an interesting and demanding job. I do not want to bring it home with me. And I most definitely do not want to write about it. After replying to Ella’s request with some breezy assurances, I retreated from my keyboard positively awash in self-loathing. Instead of avoiding the issue by telling her that I’d write something without specifying what (I’m a lawyer, after all), I should have fessed up and told her she was barking up the wrong tree.

But then I started to think about it some more. A lot of my job involves the tracking of resources. Allowing money for a tech start up or new fish and chip shop to get through, while cutting off the wherewithal to move drugs or weapons of mass destruction. Resources are finite. Whether you cut them off or wave them on, consequences follow.

The Braking Day plot is, to steal a word from Dan Moren, twisty. But a lot of it is driven by the fact that, after 132 years in deep space, resources have become constrained. Part of that plot involves terrorists (more or less). And a good chunk of it centers on the fact that the terrorists (more or less) need money – liquid water in this case. Water – and the need for water – drives a good part of the novel. Next time you see a bad guy running through a story, blowing things up with abandon and losing henchmen left and right to good-guy gunfire, think about this: where did he get the resources? Are they really as unlimited as the storyteller would have you believe? Partly because of my job, I have always had trouble with that, and I can’t bring myself to write it. In Braking Day, resources dictate what actions my characters can take, including the bad ones. Resources allow the bad guy to do things, but they can only do so much, and it gives an opening for other characters to track them down. Resources allow the good guys to move around and defend themselves, but they also limit how fast, how far, and how effectively. While it’s true that ISV-01 Archimedes doesn’t carry an expert in financial counterterrorism, she does have one telling her story.

The other thing that occurred to me is that the only way to do my job is to cooperate with other people. The whole counterterrorism enterprise is too vast for a single person to accomplish it on their own. This is not something unique to counterterrorism, of course. Human beings are social animals. We tend to do things in groups. But sometimes (often?) in the fiction game we lose sight of that. Powerfully gifted individuals save the world (or worlds) time and time again because only they can do so. Conditioned as I am by the strictures of corporate behavior, I have trouble writing that. I believe in teamwork. Ravi, my protagonist, is not a superhero. He cannot slay dozens of highly trained adversaries in hand-to-hand combat, or manually pilot a starship through an asteroid field, or put back together things that have been blown up beyond repair. He’s an “ordinary” young man. But he has two things going for him that could help any one of us achieve great things: a moral core, and friends. Although Braking Day is told entirely from Ravi’s point of view, it is very much an ensemble piece. “No man is an island entire of itself.” Ravi gets things done because his moral compass points him in the right direction and because he has friends to help him do it.

So, there you have it. I wrote Braking Day as a soothing antidote to my day job, and yet my day job informs every part of the story. Thanks, Ella, for opening my eyes!

I think.

E________, first draft: 33,300 words

Many years ago, now, my day job took me out to the West Coast. Work done, I found myself in LAX, Terminal Four, waiting for a flight home. While there, like so many travelers before me, I thought it would be a good idea to drop into Starbucks for a cup of coffee.

Turned out, the terminal had a problem with its water supply that day and the Starbucks was unable to serve anything that wasn’t bottled or chewable. Fear not, they said, this is LAX. There is another Starbucks in the terminal and their water supply is just fine.

I located the second Starbucks, swore under my breath, and decided then and there that I was done with it. The reason? The line for service was at least two city blocks long. There were hundreds of people hoping to get served. Clearly, there was a reason Terminal Four had two Starbucks. The sole survivor was simply overwhelmed.

No one in that unbelievably long line looked happy, but no one left. Or rather, they only left after a frantic glance at the watch told them they had run out of time. It was either coffee or the plane. Though I do sometimes wonder if some of them chose the coffee.

To be honest, the sight of a coffee line measured in the hundreds of yards was disturbing. It was, after all, proof positive that coffee is addictive. No one in their right mind should be standing in a two-blocks-long queue jonesing for a cup of Joe they were never going to get. Except for those people who really did have hours to kill, there was no way on God’s Earth they were ever going to get served, and yet there they were.

Fast forward to six a.m. last Saturday. The outside temperature in Pittsburgh was 17F/-8C and there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground. I planned to drive to my local coffee shop and work on E________ for a couple of hours. Problem was, for reasons I won’t bore you with, my car wouldn’t start.

I don’t have coffee in the house (don’t ask!) but what I do have is a ton of tea and a home office. A normal person would have called AAA, put the kettle on, and started writing. Instead, I trudged a mile and half to the coffee shop with a deep-frozen laptop on my back. I walked home, too. A three-mile round trip through the bitter cold and crunchy snow. And all the while I was thinking, Am I like those folks at LAX? Am I so pathetically addicted to coffee that I’ll crawl over broken icicles to get some?

Okay. That’s not completely true. I was also wondering how long I had until I got frostbite. But still.

Now, seated at a warm, comfortable writing desk and having thought about it, I don’t think I’m addicted to coffee. But I am addicted to writing in coffee shops – or anywhere that isn’t home. Hotel lobbies, airplanes, a doctor’s office, wherever. If I have time and a laptop, I start clicking away. I need the change of scenery. It makes me more creative – or maybe just happier – than if I write at home all the time. If I did that, I’d go mad. Or I wouldn’t write, which is pretty much the same thing. While there is some evidence that travel improves creativity, I don’t think the authors of those particular studies were talking about a short hop to the local barista’s. Nonetheless, and speaking just for myself, I find the act of going to a different place, sitting at a small, anonymous table, and cracking open a laptop immensely stimulating. Even if I have to slog across the urban tundra to make it happen.

Or maybe I like coffee a little too much.

E________, first draft: 27,700 words.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. As ever, an aversion to hard work lies at the root of this particular failure. List making! Public declarations! Execution! It’s all far too exhausting.

Plus, I can also rationalize my idleness by pointing out there’s a lot of evidence that resolutions don’t actually work. I suspect that if you’re the sort of person for whom resolutions make sense, you’ re also the sort of person who doesn’t actually need them. You would have done whatever it is you resolved to do anyway. And if you are going to do it, why wait to start in the new year? For sure, if I was going to resolve to go to the gym and get fit, I would start that in, say, March, when all those crispy new January resolutions have faded and wrinkled in the dreich days of late winter. There’d be less crowding in the changing rooms and shorter lines at the equipment.

But that’s not to say the long dark nights aren’t a good time for dreaming and reflection. When better? Particularly now that the rush of Christmas is over and the only thing to sustain us through the two coldest months of the year is the thought of what might lie beyond. Unless, of course, you’re a snow sports person. In which case the time for action is now!

Snow sports? Nein danke. As someone who only leaves the house at this time of year because of work or the relentless demands of the dog, dreams and reflections for 2022 are all I have. In my writing life, Braking Day is due out on April 5th, The Wrong Shape to Fly, my contribution to Baen’s Worlds Long Lost anthology will hopefully be published in the fall, and TSW, the novel formerly known as V______ R___, will be going out to market looking for a publisher in the next few weeks. My dream for 2022 is that Braking Day is a great success, The Wrong Shape to Fly leads to opportunities to write more short stories, and that someone agrees to take on TSW. Fingers crossed that the dream comes true!

But then, being the sort of person that I am, I cannot help but reflect on what will happen if the dream does come true. On top of my (not undemanding) day job, I will be committed to writing a SF follow up to Braking Day, a short story or two, editing TSW, and committing to a follow up to that. Dream realization means two novels a year, plus short stories, plus all the marketing and ancillary stuff that goes along with.

Not so long ago, I was whining about how I couldn’t do NaNoWriMo because it was too much work. Plodding along at 600 words a day over maybe a couple of hours was enough to get out a novel a year, I reckoned. The 2,000 daily words required for NaNoWriMo was, in my opinion, nothing less than a recipe for burn out and divorce.

And yet here I am, dreaming of an outcome that will more than double my present workload. Four hours a day, plus my actual, you know, job. Am I nuts?

Probably. But you know what? I don’t care. If a dream coming true leads to problems, those are the sorts of problems everyone should have.

Bring it on.

E________, first draft: 20,700 words

Deep as we are in the holiday season, there is no better time to express gratitude for gifts received out of the blue. In this particular case, I’m talking about blurbs.

We have reached the stage where my agent, the estimable Brady, and the good folks at my publisher, DAW Books, are reaching out to authors they know in the hope of persuading them to give my book a read and maybe (assuming they like it) provide a few lines of blurb about it.  Other than a sense, maybe, of paying it forward, there is nothing in it for the authors in question. They are being asked to give up their own free time to read a book they would not have read otherwise and then give up more of their free time to write a mini-review – all for someone they don’t know and have never met.

Despite the brazen-ness of the ask, no fewer than three established authors have so far taken the trouble to read Braking Day and come back with nice things to say. All in time for Christmas!

First off was retired U.S. Navy officer John Hemry, aka Jack Campbell, author of the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series, among many others. He said this:

“Engaging, fast-moving, and inventive. The characters and the space environment feel totally real, as do the life and death challenges that never miss a step.”

Given that these words could apply one hundred percent to his own work, I was blown away by the generosity of spirit in which they were written. He didn’t have to do this! Thank you!

And then, not long after, we received the following from Dan Moren, author of the Galactic Cold War series.

“Oyebanji crafts an amazing lived-in world aboard a sprawling generation ship, and a twisty mystery that’ll keep you guessing to the very end.”

Again, coming from someone who is no slouch in the twisty storyline department, this was more than gracious.

Last, but by no means least, is a quote from Julie E. Czerneda, a Canadian writer whom I have admired from afar for many years and who is the author of more than 20 books, including the Aurora-Award-winning In the Company of Others.

“Adam Oyebanji’s BRAKING DAY blows the airlocks off the science fiction mainstay of generation ships with a vibrant world within bulkheads that’s as convincing as it is fresh. The characters are fabulous, the world-building impeccable yet never in-your-face, and the plot is breathtaking. All I can say is this is the best SF novel I’ve read in decades and it may be the best I’ve ever read. This author is now a must-read for me, and I’m sure he will be for you. Bravo!!”

As you can imagine, this last one in particular left me speechless. For hours!

I like to joke that I can no longer leave the house because my head has swollen to such an extent I can no longer fit through the front door. But the truth is strangely and exactly the opposite. This is all very humbling. It’s humbling that there are people out there who are kind enough and thoughtful enough to do something like this. And it’s humbling to learn that you have written something that has had a profound effect on someone else. It fills you with the desire not to let readers down: to write something that’s worthy of their time.

Even if – humbly – you’re not at all sure you’re up to the task.

(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).

All things (except, perhaps, Covid) come to an end. The year is winding down, my son is finishing his first semester at college, my work on Braking Day is done. It is more difficult to say goodbye than I thought.

As some of you will know, I have spent most of my adult life working as a lawyer. Before I was a lawyer, though, I was a law student. One of the courses they teach larval lawyers is research. It’s hard to explain the feeling you get when you are first introduced to “the law,” an endless array of rules, regulations and the collected decisions of judges going back hundreds of years. Faced with so much information, it is easy to believe that the answer to every possible problem is in there somewhere. All you have to do is look.

That, alas, is not true. People, it turns out, are way more complicated than 600 years of legal lore. Sometimes the answer is in there. But usually not. Research gets you part but not all of the way. And yet, how do you know, really know, that the answer isn’t lurking out there among the thousands upon thousands of cases that you haven’t read? This is the conundrum that leads generation after generation of law students to ask variations of the same plaintive question: “How do I know when to stop?” The answer is usually something along the lines of, “When it feels right.” Decades into legal practice, I still have difficulty formulating a more useful response.

I did not think the same issue would arise when it came to novel writing. This, after all, is not an exercise where you have to track down information left behind by other people. You have complete control of the process. You think up a story, you write it down, you tinker with it to make it run smoothly, and you push it out the door. Job done.

Hah! Then your agent comes back with “suggestions” (repeat as necessary), which you dutifully attempt to accommodate. And after that your editor at the publishing house does the same thing (likewise endlessly repeatable).

After that, your “final” manuscript goes to the copyeditor who not only comes back with an intimidating list of grammatical and style-related corrections, but also points out embarrassing lapses in narrative (in my case, the sitting character who somehow opened a door). And once that’s done, you still have to read and check the final proof. The proof is the version of the book that will go to the printers. Does it match the manuscript you negotiated with agent, editor, and copyeditor? Are there any last-minute typos that still need to be corrected?

I finished proofreading Braking Day last Saturday at 6:49 am EST in my local coffee shop. On the other side of the plate glass windows it was still dark, and I had the place to myself. The proofreading, as it turned out, went very smoothly. There were a few teeny tiny nits but nothing major. There is now nothing left for me to do. I am done. Everything that remains is in the hands of the publisher, the booksellers and (most importantly of all) the readers.

I started Braking Day almost exactly four years ago, in December 2017. I have written and rewritten it at least eight times. As I sat back from my laptop and stared out the window into the darkened street, I expected to feel a sense of triumph, of deep satisfaction in a job well done. And I did. Kind of.

But what I also felt was a sense of regret. Not because I will miss writing Braking Day (although I will) but because there are scenes in the final version that I desperately, desperately want to have another go at. If I had my time again, I am certain I could make them better. One scene in particular, which my agent, the estimable Brady, suggested I make longer, is not long enough. I couldn’t figure out how to do it at the time and now I can. But it’s too late.

I think the truth (a truth?) about novel writing is this. A novel can never be perfect. It can only (if you’re lucky) be good. Once it’s good, you have to let it go.

And doing so will never, ever, feel right.

(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).

As close readers of this blog will know, since the beginning of Covid I have been alternating my reading between genre books that I enjoy and “posh” books (many also enjoyable) that are meant to be good for me. I have lapsed on several occasions, squeezing in a couple of genre novels before plunging into the next classic. Over the last two or three weeks, however, I have completely fallen off the wagon. After reading The Tempest by William Shakespeare (and feeling much aggrieved by the plight of Caliban), I not only read A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas but have also been working my way steadily through every single one of Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories. I am presently (re)reading Network Effect and need to swing by my local bookstore next week to pick up the latest novella, Fugitive Telemetry. If pressed on why I am doing this, the short answer would be that I love Sarah J. Maas and Martha Wells. A more honest answer, though, involves a dread of what comes next.

I don’t have a system for deciding what posh books to read next. It’s literally whatever title pops into my head, and what pops into my head tends to be titles of books that I’ve heard posh people (not me) talking about at parties, or that have been mentioned in passing in the literary and/or lifestyle sections of upscale newspapers.

Enter The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevksy. It’s Russian and from the nineteenth century, so I knew it was going to be long and (I’m guessing) probably a bit of a downer. I was OK with that, though. Winter is here. A long read with a grim beginning, middle and end is entirely in keeping with the season. What I’m less OK with is my choice of print copy. I went for the only one my bookstore had in stock: the Penguin Classics paperback. At 985 pages it is predictably massive, but the problem I have – and I’ve always had – with Penguin Classics is that I find them very hard to read. Not because of the language but because of the tiny print and the narrow margins. The margins are a particular source of grievance because, having spent far too much of my childhood reading paperbacks in bookstores without actually buying the book, I can’t stand “breaking” a book’s spine so it will lie flat on the table. Look at my bookshelves and most of my paperbacks look as good as new. Look at my Penguins and every one of them has a badly creased spine: there’s simply no other way to read them because the words start so close to the middle of the book. What has put me off starting on The Brothers Karamazov is the knowledge that the mechanics of reading the thing are going to be so unpleasant.

Which brings me to the subject of book design. Penguin Classics are presumably made harder to read because it saves paper. A lot of classics are long, they are never out of print, and Penguin always includes a lot of high-quality academic commentary, so I imagine the cumulative savings in production costs are enormous. Also (and now I’m just being cynical) because so many Penguin Classics are compulsory reading at high school and college, I can’t help thinking that design aesthetics is lower down the list of priorities than it usually is.

I’m peculiarly sensitive to design at the moment because DAW has just sent me a pdf of the proof of Braking Day for – wait for it – proofreading. This is a copy of what the inside of the book will look like when it hits the shelves in April. My job is to make sure that what’s in the proof matches what I wrote in the original manuscript. I also get some input into how it looks (awesome, by the way! Apart from changing the dedication font to something less “shouty,” there’s absolutely nothing I would want to change). The format for Braking Day is the standard hardback size of six by nine inches. The font size is such that there are 36 lines on a full page and the whole book (130,000 words) will come in at about 360 pages. A couple of DAW hardbacks I’ve plucked off my bookshelves are broadly similar.

Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, has 35 lines to the page and is 456 pages long (it didn’t feel that long when I read it!) which equates to a wordcount of (very roughly) 150-160,000.

Alliance Rising, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, has 40 lines to the page and is 346 pages long, so the wordcount will be in the 130-140,000 range.

By comparison, The Brothers Karamazov also has 40 lines to the page but those 40 lines are crammed into a paperback format of five inches by seven and three-quarter inches (I don’t even want to do the wordcount). Which looks, predictably, like this.

And if you’re having trouble envisaging the size difference between a DAW hardback versus Penguin Classics, this is what it looks like. It is significant.

All told, design can have a significant effect on how “readable” a book is. Right now, I am grateful that being a classic author is not in my future!

(E________, first draft: 17,600 words)

Book titles change for a variety of reasons. British readers, steeped as they are in medieval culture, know a little bit about alchemy. As such, they are reasonably familiar with the concept of the philosopher’s stone, a prerequisite for the elixir of life or turning lead into gold. American readers (for whom, the British will tell you, history starts in 1776) have no such advantage. Accordingly, while Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was viewed as an acceptable title in the UK, in the US it was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone instead. (Incidentally, if you want a glimpse of how nonsense like alchemy managed to survive for so long, you could do a good deal worse than read the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is a brilliant documentation of medieval fraud.)

In similar vein, it is said that Joseph Heller wanted to call the book for which he is most famous Catch-18 but didn’t want it confused with Mila 18 by Leon Uris. He then considered Catch-11 but ran into the same problem because of Ocean’s 11 (the 1960 Frank Sinatra movie, not the George Clooney remake). His editor settled on Catch-22 because 22 was a “funnier” number than 18.

Some books, however, get their titles changed because the author’s original choice was replaced by something better. Jane Austen’s First Impressions is better known as Pride and Prejudice, no one has read The Last Man In Europe by George Orwell, although they are familiar with 1984, and John Steinbeck eventually decided to go with Of Mice and Men instead of Something That Happened.

And then, there’s yours truly. While I am reasonably confident that I am an OK writer, it is becoming more and more clear to me that I am absolutely terrible at book titles. My original title for Braking Day was Starship 4. Almost the first thing my original agent said to me when I spoke to her on the phone was, “How do you feel about the title?” I took the hint.

One of the reasons I use initials to identify works in progress is that the working title I love so much is probably cringeworthy. I am very pleased with how my second novel, V______ R___, has turned out. But when my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant James came back to me the other day with some very minor edits, they also appended a list of 25 (twenty-five!) alternative titles.

Having read through them, I was left with the distinct impression that the two of them had cracked open a bottle of vodka, come up with a list of titles ranging from sensibly sober to bombed out drunk, and then rearranged said list to disguise the progression. Unfortunately for me, but not surprising in any way, at least half of them (including some of the bombed out drunk ones) were way better than V______ R___. Having consulted with my family (who treacherously side with my agent), V______ R___ has now become T__ S__ W__C___ I___ T__ C________, a terrible acronym but a great title. TSW for short (and still initialized because, who knows, it might change again!).

Despite what I’ve just said, I fervently believe that E________, the novel I’m working on at the moment, is a really good name for a book and will stand the test of time. However, as my fervent belief has never survived contact with reality, E________ will remain E________ only until further notice.

(E________, first draft: 13,600 words)

When the good folks at DAW sent me the copy-edited version of Braking Day, it contained detailed instructions on how to review, so that if the copyeditor’s suggested amendments conflicted with my preferences, I could change them in such a way that the final version actually reflects my wishes.  So focused was I on following DAW’s granular guidance on editing the copyedit, I almost missed the following.

“If you would like to have a dedication and/or acknowledgments page in this book, or any other front or back matter, please send those to me at the same time as the reviewed manuscript.”

Yikes!  I hadn’t even thought about this.  I am not the sort of person who even thinks to send out thank-you notes (though I am always tickled pink when I receive one), so expressing gratitude in written form is not one of my strengths.  Although the principal reason for this failure is congenital bone idleness, a lesser ground is this: most people will overlook a failure to offer written thanks.  They will not, however, forgive a written thank-you to a third party when they themselves have been left out.  Acknowledgments are a social minefield.  One false step and you are dead to someone.

Being a man of immense bravery, my immediate reaction was to duck the whole issue and not write one, like C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher in Alliance Rising, or maybe do something super-short and high level like Martha Wells in Network Effect (I worship at the altar of Murderbot!) but these are all established writers who can get away with that sort of thing.  Mine is a traditionally published debut novel.  And I am incredibly lucky to be in a position to write the previous sentence.  It really does feel like winning the lottery and it would be churlish in the extreme to not at least try to thank the many, many people who have helped make that happen.  So, if you get to the acknowledgment page, and I have forgotten to mention you, I am really, really, really sorry.  Braking Day went through eight rounds of edits.  I only had one shot at the acknowledgment.

I don’t want to be dead to you.

(E________, first draft: 13,600 words)

The U.S. version of Braking Day has come back from copyediting. Copyediting (and copy editors) have always been a mystery to me. I had this vague sense that it involved correcting typos but it’s so much more than that. For better or worse, copy editors are the enforcement arm of the style manuals.  The copy editor is the one who makes sure the manuscript’s syntax is smooth, that the writing adheres to the conventions of grammar, that wording is proper and precise and that punctuation is both appropriate and correctly placed. When it comes to fiction – and science fiction, in particular – this is not an easy job. How do you tell when we have roughed up the syntax for dramatic emphasis as opposed to just screwing it up? Is bad grammar in the dialog the way a character speaks or a failing in the author? Which version of a made up word is spelled correctly? Copy editors wrestle with this every single day.

On top of that – and I really did not appreciate this – the copy editor is the last line of defense against howlers in the text: “How can this character be opening a door when he’s still sitting down?” Thank you, Copy Editor, thank you!

The copy edit for Braking Day is a masterclass in that bible of American English, the Chicago Manual of Style. While, as predicted, the copy editor came after my idiosyncratic attachment to alright instead of all right, I learned just how much I still do not know about punctuation, word usage (a hold versus ahold, for instance), and (embarrassingly) basic grammar.

The most eye opening thing about this exercise, however, concerns numbers. Everything I know about writing numbers can be summed up as follows: if it’s ten or less, spell it out in words, otherwise use numerals.

Hah!

For starters, CMoS (which sounds more like a computer language than a style-manual acronym) “advises” you to spell out numbers up to and including one hundred. No reason is advanced: it just does. And there’s more….

Don’t start a sentence with a numeral. Write it out. “Three hundred and eleven men and 302 women took to the streets.”

Spell out round numbers. “The pot was thought to be six thousand years old. Radiocarbon dating indicated a precise age of 5,998 years.”

If two numbers need to be placed next to each other, spell out the smaller number. “He ordered 15 twelve-foot boards.” “The platoon was arrayed in three 12-person rows.”

When writing discourse, numbers should usually be spelled out, with some exceptions (years, for instance – but why?). ” ‘We found a hundred and eleven bodies,’ he said, remembering. ‘That would have been back in 1985.'”

Working through all this has been a trip. I’ve learned a lot and will try to apply it to the E________ manuscript this winter. The kicker, though, is that every one of these rules has exceptions. It’s enough to drive one mad!

Or to take up copyediting.

(E________, first draft: 10,300 words)

Some ideas are so bad, so obviously stupid, so not in your best interests, that you can’t stop acting on them.

Years and years ago, when I was a junior barrister, I had a court case in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Stoke, by the way, is at the heart of the region known as The Potteries, for all the fine china that is produced there. (Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, was also born nearby.) Stoke was roughly an hour up the road from where I lived at the time so, prudent young man that I was, I left home an hour before I needed to get there.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, what barristers do and how they do it is a mystery to large chunks of the outside world. That said, the one thing almost everyone does understand about barristers is that they wear wigs and gowns when they appear in court. This, in fact, is not always true, but it was very true on this particular day. Turning up in court without a wig and gown in such situations feels pretty much the same as appearing naked in public. Judges, if they have a mind, will announce after you have spoken that they “can’t hear you,” and raising your voice won’t do the slightest bit of good. All you can do is slink shamefaced out of court and hope one of your colleagues of approximately the same size will take pity on you and let you borrow their duds. The price being, of course, that he or she gets first shot at spreading the tale of your abject humiliation around the barristerial community at large.

Needless to say, the one thing I did obsessively and repeatedly before getting in the car that morning was to check that I had packed my wig and gown. And there they were, packed (reasonably) neatly beside my law books and pink-ribboned “brief.”

As I rolled up the motorway with no margin for error I suddenly thought, “It would be horribly embarrassing if I forgot my wig and gown. Thank goodness I didn’t!” I’m sure I smiled a little at the absurdity of it and moved on to other things. Like my upcoming case.

But what if I had forgotten my wig and gown?

I didn’t.

Yeah, but what if you did?

The miles continued to roll by and soon the thought that I’d left my wig and gown behind became the only thing I could think about. I knew I’d packed my stuff properly. I knew if I stopped to check, I would be late for court. I knew I was being silly.

I pulled over anyway.

I arrived late.

This kind of irrational behavior is known as giving in to the “imp of the perverse,” after the 1850 story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe.

“[T]hrough its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.”

The other day, typing happily away at the early pages of E________, it suddenly occurred to me that what I was writing might be garbage. What if EK, the first of my two protagonists, comes across as a complete, total, unacceptable jackass? No one will like him, no one will read the book, it’s going to be a disaster. You should delete everything and start again.

I know this is a really stupid idea, the manifestation of some kind of insecurity or, possibly, a dodgy egg sandwich. But it would not go away. I literally had to turn off my computer and walk away from my desk to stop myself erasing several thousand words worth of work.

The next day I sat down, opened up my laptop and found that Poe’s evil imp was still sitting on my shoulder. At the end of the day, though, I managed to fight it off.

Two things saved me. First, I remembered a quote from that peerless mistress of SF, C.J. Cherryh: “It is perfectly okay to write garbage–as long as you edit brilliantly,” which transmogrified in my head to, “Write first. Worry later.” Then my second protagonist, AE, made her first appearance. As she is, in many ways, EK’s antithesis, writing her was like pouring antacid on the indigestion EK is causing me. I stopped worrying and got back to the sheer joy of throwing words onto the page. The imp of the perverse has been beaten!

For now.