The good news is that I’ve started reviewing my work on In Victrix (after a three and a half years hiatus), and I aim to finish editing it and publish it. Bad news, is that it will take well into 2024 until you can get your hands on it. Sorry — but it’s definitely coming!

Until then, and to remind myself what it is to be an author, here’s a graphic description of an author trying to kick-(re)start a writing habit.

Organising life

The most important thing is always to organise the rest of your life around your writing. You need to dedicate a solid chunk of time at regular intervals to sit down and do some writing. Getting everything else in your life aligned for that one hour of quiet time feels like this:

(Also applies to characters going on tangential sub-plots you didn’t see coming. At least for us plantsers).

Writing

Since all the best ideas comes at times you can’t possibly write (from showers to waking up past midnight), you leave yourself notes with Bright Ideas™️. In the light of morning, of course, they made less sense and you have to wonder what “3 gremlin ghostsl lkjdfg” actually means for your current project:

Never mind those. Let’s start by reading what we wrote last time, in case it feels a bit stale:

Hmm, it may need some touch ups. (Not to say, fish-sauce).

Fight Scenes

These take a lot of careful planning, mental choreography, nimble linguistic execution, and hours of historical research to convey the speed, chaos, and stakes of the fight to the reader. Otherwise, they may fall flat.

The Climax

OK, so now we come to that tricky bit in the plot, where we have to carefully manoeuvre our characters into place. It’s pulling all the psychological and geopolitical strings carefully for an emotional climax. We must absolutely not get diverted into unsanctioned side-plots by our wilful characters, or we’ll write ourselves into a corner and struggle to return to the plan:

Plot holes

Care must be taken with all the sub-plots, intentional misdirections, accidental miscalculations, rewrites, and variations between drafts due to phases of the moon. When you get close to finishing the novel, you should inspect the whole work carefully, looking for loose ends lest you fall into a plot-hole.

Publishing…

I swear to you, there are gremlins that sit between your keyboard and the printer! As soon as you hit send, they rush out and intercept the work to sprinkle it with typos. At least, that’s how I feel when I read the copy and see words I never even knew existed make it past all my editors:

… and Marketing

Now’s it’s time to promote yourself on social media:

(Also applies to reading those 1-star reviews on Goodreads).

Then again

When you pull everything off, and you go back and read a story that you love because you wrote the story you wanted to read and other people like it too! and you just feel like doing a happy dance!

Or just fall asleep satisfied with life … only to dream about the next book’s plot:

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Hope you found this tongue-in-cheek post entertaining. The sad reality is it will probably prove more popular than my writing, but hey! I’m in this for the fun 😺

I am, as I said, working on getting back into writing. I started by re-reading the previous Felix novels to get into the mood (More about that later, but while I found a few cucumbers, there’s certainly more than a bit of happy dreaming). As I get deeper into this I’ll no doubt post more writing-related content (not just book reviews and ancient Roman news), but for now I hope you found the above adorably entertaining. We all need more of that in our lives.

Enjoying the articles, but curious if I’m just full of it or really make use of those varied subjects? Happy to elaborate! Go meet Felix, the protagonist of the Togas, Daggers, and Magic series, an historical-fantasy blend of a paranormal detective on the background of ancient Rome.

You can Felix and his world on the free short stories and novels!