Hello, from the other side of a finished book
and what it feels like to always miss your deadlines
I can’t start this without saying hello. How are you? Are you wearing SPF? Are you drinking enough water?
I’ll answer in return. I am full of joy. I am not wearing SPF. I have almost drunk enough water if you count a mango Rubicon as hydrating. I write to you from a park in London. My legs are lined with the imprint of my sandals because I can’t get comfy. The grass is drying out, parched already despite England experiencing the wettest June on record. We are now tipping into a very wet July. As though it were just a threat, the city is muggy and humming with warmth now. It is a whole ten degrees warmer than it was last week. In a single breath, I went from complaining about the cold to complaining about the heat. It’s in my bones, I am British after all.
Most importantly, I write to you from the other side of a finished book. Oh, I need to add a huge caveat here. Finished for now. The book is finished for now. Just this morning, I opened the manuscript on my laptop and spotted a fistful of typos that I couldn’t leave, so I emailed it to my editor again. Sorry, this is the final FINAL version.
This is my fourth novel. Those of you who have been here from the start will know that my very first newsletter was written when my book was already seven months late. My baby has bookended this project. I went on a writing retreat in March of 2022, to a perpetually windy cottage on the North Norfolk coast with my friend, and over the course of five days, I plotted the anchor points of my story. By day three, I felt a heaviness in my arms, like someone had threaded lead through my veins. I scribbled in my notebook, decided on names for my two protagonists, and counted twenty-eight days in my calendar. I decided on an inciting incident that involved an email with two recipients and my friend joked that I shouldn’t have wine at dinner.
I drove us back to London in my mum’s hatchback because Norfolk had run out of diesel and we cried listening to every Self Esteem album as we floored it down the M25. I didn’t go home straight away. I drove straight to Sainsbury’s and bought three pregnancy tests. I only needed one.
My first deadline was two weeks before my baby was due and I worked towards that date with the blinkered and deluded expectation that I would send off my manuscript and head out the door to the maternity suite. Two birds, one stone, and all that. But as winter came, I didn’t wind down, I wound myself up figuring out word counts per day, per hour, willing away the heavy breathing and wobbly lunges of pregnancy yoga because it was ‘time I could have spent on my book.’
In this whole process, I have been the only one who enforced a wholly unrealistic deadline. My agent, editor, and family, possibly after seeing the whites in my eyes, told me that is was fine to ask for an extension. I did, in the end, right when the nesting instinct took over and right before I started walking up and down the hill to Crystal Palace to tempt the baby out.
I’ve written extensively about how I had to figure out how to ‘do it’ on the timeline of my little sleep vampire. I won’t go into it all here, but she got easier, and it got easier. I left my manuscript at 73,000 words, and when I opened Scrivener again when she was four months old, I saw that I had stopped my book mid-sentence and not opened it up again.
Distance and time was the best thing that happened to this book. Without it, I wouldn’t have realised that I’d written it all in the wrong point of view, and in the wrong tense. I re-wrote it from the start and it’s so much better for it. It added another three months onto the workload, but the only person who worried about that was me.
Last week, I finished a second draft on the day my baby turned eighteen months. I didn’t plan for that, but there we go. They say it takes eighteen months for your organs to drift back into place after giving birth, and it has taken eighteen months for my words to slot back together as well.
I am on the cusp of what feels like a very pivotal point in my writing life, and possibly my career. I am starting something in September that I will talk about more very soon, but it is so full of promise and hope that I feel like announcing it will curse it into oblivion. I want to write something a little different and I have a story that I have been drifting in and out of for a long time now. It won’t leave me, but it is bolder and more challenging that anything I have written before and I’m worried that talking about it too soon will extinguish the tiny spark that I have been blowing on very slowly.
Anyway, back to this. To my writing here. I don’t want to keep calling this ‘My Substack’ because it feels like a mould I’m trying to fit my offering into when in reality, I have probably been overthinking that. I’m going to simplify things going forward, to streamline. One day I won’t think like a teacher anymore, which comes with the burden of needing to offer the world and having a paper plate and a broken fork to serve it with. I could do with your help.
✨ Will you lend me 2-3 minutes of your time? ✨
I’d love to know what you’d like to see from me on here. Anything you can tell me will be super useful and in return, I’ll send you a short story called Blue Monday. I wrote it a while back and in it, I revisit my two main characters from The Lonely Fajita: Elissa and Annie.
You can send me your thoughts here.
Now, here’s what you can expect for the next month:
The return of the Three-minute writing challenge. The first will go live on Wednesday July 17th
You can read the last round of winning submissions below:
Not a Write Off vol: 8
The last one is here:
An as-yet-unspecified post on writing, publishing, craft, and career
The last one I wrote about was on tropes:
About the author:
Abigail Mann is an author, book coach, and writing mentor. She is currently writing her fourth novel for HarperCollins and has a thing for sharp contemporary literature with a comic edge. Abigail coaches with the London Writer’s Salon and privately mentors writers who need to cloud bust their plots, clean up their submissions, or reach a fiction milestone. Her other internet home is here.
CONGRATULATIONS! I loved all of this post, but this in particular struck me: They say it takes eighteen months for your organs to drift back into place after giving birth, and it has taken eighteen months for my words to slot back together as well.
WOWOWOW! 🧡🧡🧡
"They say it takes eighteen months for your organs to drift back into place after giving birth, and it has taken eighteen months for my words to slot back together as well." this line stopped me in my tracks, there's something so poignant in that connection.