Not a Write Off vol: 8
The one where I am in novel limbo land, I stop calling the baby a baby, and get clobbered by a plastic bucket
If you haven’t come across one of these posts before, let me give you a quick tour. It’s the less polished recap of the past month, a bit like a diary entry. Imagine we’ve found some shade in a park and I’ve cracked out two mango flavoured Rubicons for us to sup. Links to recent posts, workshops, and mentoring opportunities are at the end.
You know what I didn’t expect, not in a million years? That I would be able to work and write to a soundtrack of intense, assaulting gym music. I can drown it out, focus on the words, and when I want to, eavesdrop on the conversations of people around me who talk about oblique muscles and their protein intake. Anyone who works freelance will know that finding a decent place to prop you laptop when you can’t work in the house is a mission of Holy Grail proportions. Friends, let me tell you a secret. Gym cafés. More often than not, they don’t require you to have a membership, the internet is good, and people generally leave you alone.
I have edited short stories from gym cafés, mentored from gym cafés, gossiped with my writer friends from gym cafés, and drafted chapters of my novel from gym cafés. It turns out that my perfect gym visit is one where I am approximately twelve foot and a wall away from any equipment.
This volume has been in the works since I returned here, to my newsletter, after handing my fourth novel in to my editor. I’m waiting on the edits and in the meantime, ticking off the life admin that I have put off for months and months. I weeded the garden. I did my tax return nine months early. I have been preparing for a role that I’m taking on in September: my dream job, really. I went to a spa with a friend to celebrate successfully raising a baby to the toddler stage. I came back with strep throat.
Don’t get me wrong, the spa was amazing. I was either in water or near water all day, took my book into a sauna, and fell asleep on a water bed for almost two hours, which I have since realised equates to paying £30 for a nap. I’m convinced that if you surveyed mothers, £30 would be considered more than reasonable for sensory deprivation. Perhaps there’s a market in that.
More than anything, I’m feeling excited for the next year. There’s always a tiny part of my lizard brain that says ‘HA! Now you’ve communicated HOPE out loud I’m going to do my best to RUIN it,’ but that isn’t logical. I write main characters, but I am not the world’s main character. It isn’t out to get me. Besides, how can a vindictive God exist when there’s a new series of Below Deck to watch every three months?
I’m going to announce a few changes to the way I roll out content on here, which sounds more dramatic than it is in reality. I’m going to be really busy really soon and need to be more present in some places and more obscure in others. Anyway, I’ve penned news below, some recommendations, and very early thoughts on what I’m writing next. Enjoy, pals.
The novel…
Okay, so I did make a big bold claim in my last post about the fact that I had finished my book. The truth of it is that you finish a book a number of times (do you ever finish it, truly?) and although I did write ‘The End,’ as you are accustomed to do before deleting it and sending it off again, it isn’t finished finished. I handed in something which was akin to a 2.5 draft. I rewrote the whole thing in a different POV, cut out some hefty chapters that felt a little gratuitous and silly, and pulled out phrases that lacked clarity. Some dialogue exchanges read like I’d written them whilst high on space cake except it wasn’t space, it was the witching hours of mid-winter and it wasn’t cake, it was sleep deprivation.
All that to say that I’m in a limbo of sweet, sweet ignorance until my editor gets back to me with notes and then I’ll work at those before we go to a copy edit. What this looks like is me trying to group edits by character, sub-plot, or task. I sift things out of my manuscript, inspect them under a magnifying glass, and ask them to prove why they deserve to go back in.
In the past, I’ve had developmental edits that have taken me six weeks to do comfortably (whilst working a regular job three days a week). On the flipside, with another book, it took me seven months to get the edits done because the changes felt vast and I was juggling far more than was realistic. Each book is a different beast. I am a different writer now. A little more sage. A little less precious. A little more experienced about what readers like from me and what pisses them off.
If you’d like to see how I spent my first proper day off after I turned in the manuscript, you can watch it in sixty seconds here.
The other novel..?
I don’t know if I’ve written this down anywhere—perhaps I’ll have to go through old Not A Write Off Volumes—but I had an idea for a book whilst breastfeeding the baby one night. It was when she was around four months old, when the feeds went from being forty minutes long to twenty. At that time, I didn’t try to read, watch YouTube with my phone propped up on one knee, or listen to an audiobook. In an attempt to stay sleepy enough to go back to sleep, I just… had a think. Fucking wild, just thinking.
I thought and thought about a character—a mother—and her story, which has been tickling at my sides ever since. I filled my dried fountain pen with purple ink (my protagonist is a purple ink kind of woman), wrote the idea out, and pitched it to my agent the next day. It’s different, it’s bold, it’s totally out of my comfort zone, but we’re going for it. I don’t think I’ll talk about it in any more detail for a while yet, but essentially I feel like a teenager who has a cool, slightly audacious French exchange partner coming to stay and I’m worried she’ll get me in trouble or swear in front of my parents.
The baby…
She isn’t one, anymore, is she? If it looks like a toddler, speaks like a toddler, and clobbers you with a plastic bucket like a toddler, then it’s probably a toddler.
I’ve been taking selfies with her in the mirror since she was born, specifically in that sweet moment of quiet after getting her to sleep. She has gone from a scrunched potato, head neatly tucked into my collarbone, to a long limbed little girl who hooks her knees over my elbow and has pigtails that stick up like fountains.
I cannot think of myself without it being in relation to her, and whilst that bungee chord has increasingly flexed and sprung back further as time goes on, I feel that she is her own little person in every sense of the word, and I am back to thinking about what I want, what my hopes are, what my ambitions might look like in the next couple of years.
There is no stage of parenting that feels ‘signed off,’ but things are more predictable now and I don’t feel like I’m flying by the seat of my pants anymore. Partly, she is easier to understand because she talks like an enthusiastic theatre kid who has been told to ‘perform each line with gusto’. You know, in the process of trying to understand her, there’s a beautiful mystery in her inability to distinguish between present, past, future tense, what’s in a book, or in real life. Everything feels very close, very immediate, very pressing, to her little head. Her sense of hearing is hawk-like. She can decipher between the cries of our two neighbours children, tilting her head like a little sparrow, to tell me who it is that she can hear.
Finding joy in…
I haven’t read a Fantasy book in years. The last was during my time teaching up in Yorkshire and I found it all a bit silly. It didn’t deliver me somewhere else, like the doorstop thick novels I used to lug around in my rucksack as a teenager. Ever a late coming fan of the bandwagon, I started reading Rebecca Yaros’ Fourth Wing and am now onto the second one, Iron Flame. The things I could tell you about Dragon Lore… I read almost exclusively in audio nowadays which means that the upgraded Fantasy of today—the kind for adults with dragons AND shagging—can be consumed whilst I’m shopping for maple syrup in the supermarket. Happy days. It IS silly, the characters ARE all hot and young AND unseasonably confident for twenty-two year olds, but it’s also the most compelling thing I have read in a long time. I have also read A Court of Thorns and Roses (the gateway book to new Fantasy) and I enjoyed it, but a little less owing to the fact that I was maybe sixty-percent of the way through before I realised that every single character wears a mask—far from the oddest thing in the book—but alas.
In the tiny window of television that I manage in the evening, I’ve been watching My Lady Jane, which is a fun historical drama about the short-lived Queen Jane with a Gossip Girl-esque voiceover, except—again—everyone wants to shag everyone else and people can randomly turn into adults. You get the gist.
On the flipside, I’ve read two non-fiction books—unusual for me—the first being Matrescence by Lucy Jones. To say it has been a tonic for the anxiety-fuelled reading I did in the early days of motherhood, convinced there was a way to ensure I raised my baby in way that would guarantee success in every way, is an understatement. Other than adolescence, there is no other time that affects the mind, body, and brain as much as having a child and this book examines the science and social impact of that change. It’s interesting and life-affirming, sure, but I found the commentary on how capitalism and oppressive ‘Trad wife, gentle parenting’ norms the most useful. I wish I’d read it sooner.
I have been pushing The Baby on the Fire Escape onto every person I know who is also a primary caregiver. The author asks the question ‘what does a “room of one’s own” look like in a domestic space? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot—this idea of creativity and how it abuts, conflicts, and is broadened by caring for a baby as well. I really do think that reading this book has changed my whole understanding of what it is that I do, who I am when I do it, and how I can keep going in the future.
My Not A Write Off win this week:
You know that idea I was talking about earlier? The one I thought about during the nights whilst I fed the baby back to sleep? I actually wrote it down, prompted my a coffee date with my agent. I really, really wanted to tell her about it but I also have a habit of talking down an idea, garbling the details until it sounds like plot soup. In the end, I didn’t need my notes. This story is the clearest one I’ve had, and I thank those nameless hours for that. I thought those hours in my rocking chair with my tired head propped on a pillow was ‘dead’ time that couldn’t be used for anything else. I was wrong, clearly. From boredom, a story has emerged.
💡 September Workshop
Oh, September. For those of you who were excited by new jotter pads and rubbers in the shapes of small animals, September probably SCREAMS will the idea of possibility.
As such, I’m going to be hosting an online workshop in late September. It’s likely to run for two hours, with one hour of content and half an hour of ‘office hours’ style Q&A at the end.
I’ll take stock of votes next week and let you know as soon as the booking page goes live. This is likely the last one I’ll do in a while as I have a new deadline for writing my next book, which is going to require laser vision focus.
You can read more of my writing by picking up my novels, either from any decent bookshop or through your local library (never feel bad about this - I actually make more money from a library loan than a Kindle purchase). The Lonely Fajita (2021), The Sister Surprise (2022), or The Wedding Crasher (2023). My books have sold nearly 20,000 copies and I am so grateful that people like my dark lil’ sense of humour and fish-out-of-water heroines.
Reviews of my work:
'‘I relished this witty, tender story of loneliness, growth and friendship. Mann has a fabulous knack of finding the funny in life’s small detail’ - Pernille Hughes
‘Heartwarming, charming and witty’ - Sophie Cousens #1 bestselling author of This Time Next Year
‘The perfect blend of warm and witty you can't help but smile (and laugh) throughout’ - Helly Acton, author of The Shelf
‘Had me laughing all the way through, and I got weepy at the end’ - Sara Nisha Adams, author of The Reading List
‘I laughed the whole way through and cried at the end. The perfect smart, escapist read’ - Freya Sampson, author of The Last Chance Library
‘As comforting as putting on your cosiest sweater and fuzzy socks. I loved every moment of it’ - Jesse Sutanto, author of Dial A For Aunties
‘Yet another hilarious and touching book from Abigail Mann, with a cast of great and terrible characters and a setting full of Succession-esque glamour and drama’ - Lex Croucher, author of Gwen and Art are Not in Love
‘Abigail Mann is at her absolute best . . . she skillfully uses comedy alongside other more serious topics’ - Holly McCulloch, author of The Mix Up
Share your Not A Write Off win in the comments below, or drop me a note if you want to chat about anything mentioned. Thank you for being here!
My win this week was to sit and watch the clouds on 3 different occasions. I just had knee surgery and it was a great excuse to sit on the porch doing nothing but cloud watching and resting. Maybe someday I’ll describe what I saw.
Looking forward to your next book! Your September workshop sounds lovely.