I wrote somewhere that there is no surer sign of an unwillingness to write than an untended blog. I should perhaps qualify that statement, because blogs might remain untended for all sorts of reasons, chief of these being, in my case, that no-one cares what I think, but coming a close second is that one is far too busy writing something else. So it has been with me for the past few weeks.
I have been contracted to write another book. As it’s in the early stages let’s pretend it’s a popular work on moral philosophy called The Only Way Is Ethics, even though it’s neither. Getting the synopsis right was hard work. In the early days it would take a year to get the synopsis into a state that my agent would not feel embarrassed showing it to a publisher. Even today, with a substantial oeuvre on my shelf, publishers still like a synopsis, and they are still hard to get right, though they don’t take as long as a year.
Eventually the synopsis passed muster but two things happened.
First, my UK publisher bought it, and I have a contract, but my editor announced that he was leaving for another publisher (editors do this) which was a shame because he is in my opinion something of a wunderkind and his ideas for reframing the synopsis were on point. I’m sure he’ll go on to do great(er) things. Happily his replacement is highly experienced and well-thought-of, but different editors have different opinions.
Second, my US publisher declined the option to publish The Only Way Is Ethics, citing poor sales of my earlier works (publishers often say this) but it reflects a declining market for popular science in the US, perhaps as that country lurches into a new Dark Age.
The third thing, out of these two things, was that a book appeared with a similar theme and title to mine. The publisher didn’t think this was a problem, but I felt I had to recast things somewhat. And that’s what I’ve been doing.
One of the subjects in The Only Way is Ethics, which I tackle in the first chapter, is something I know (or knew) very little about — too little even to make a kind of plan. I had to research the subject from the ground up. Writing was postponed until I was practically OMT on it and was ready to start writing. This was an amazing experience as I like learning new things, but one chapter became two, and I ended up writing the equivalent of a scholarly Annual-Reviews type article on this subject, though with more jokes. (The abbreviation ‘OMT’ is Gee-family slang and not suitable for polite use).
During the course of this I thought some more and got a richer, deeper appreciation of what the book should be about, so having drafted these chapters I drafted a prologue – which acts as an overture to all the chapters – as well as writing chapter summaries and a new statement of intent. Phew! So, almost 40,000 words later, I have a document I’m happy with, which I have sent to my agent; my editors old and new; and the foreign-rights department of my UK publisher who want to start hawking the idea abroad.
During this process I avoided AI for the actual writing. I’m a writer, dash it all, and people actually pay money for words put together, in some sort of order, by me. I didn’t use AI to correct anything. I did use AI, though, as a kind of search engine when I wanted to look up papers, using specific prompts such as ‘is there any evidence that Southend Pier is made of toenails and treacle?’ and then I’d take it from there. For the final check, before sending, I had the computer read the text to me at a slow pace, while I followed along. This picked up the kind of mi$takes it’s easy to miss when reading silently to oneself, as one often skips across things without noticing.
So, there we are. I might take thirty minutes off, or even half an hour, before I start researching for chapter 3, during which break I can catch up with this untended blog.
