How Not to Sequel

In previous posts, I detailed how I wrote my first book, got conned by a pretend agent, and self-published The Road Cain Walks out of disillusionment with the publishing process. My next novel went in a completely different direction from the first, switching genres from psychological thriller to postapocalyptic fantasy. I finished its first draft and was tinkering with plot points when I had an idea. What if this story was the eventual future of the events in The Road Cain Walks? What if I went back and rewrote a novel only a few people had read anyway?

So I did. It took a decade, but the novel became so much better for how deeply I dove into its setting and characters. It didn’t sell a million copies—I doubt it even sold a thousand—but the reviews proved I was right. Though the sample is small, the ratings sit at 4.1 on Amazon (26 reviewers) and 4.4 on Goodreads (24 reviewers). I entered it in the running for a self-published book award and didn’t place but made it far enough to get feedback from the judges, one of whom generously gave directions for what still needed work.

The biggest problem was the novel’s length. I shrank the font to cram the text into 481 pages; Amazon generously clocked the ebook at around 700. The word count was in the 300,000 range, which in book math translates to over 1,200 pages. Other writers have published books that length to varied success, but it’s a potential death sentence for first-time authors. Given the choice to read a 300-page book from a familiar author or one with 500+ pages written by someone I’ve never heard of, I’ll take the shorter one nine times out of ten. I bet most other readers would do the same. But I’d spent enough time on this story and needed to move on. So I planned an eventual final pass to trim the fat to a more reasonable length and turned my focus toward something new.

As mentioned in a previous post (I need to go through and hyperlink these at some point), writing a book is the key ingredient to boosting mental fertility. Nothing flows those creative juices more than being creative, the same way exercising itself motivates you to exercise. Spending 10 years on The Road Cain Walks’s rewrite, I had the sequel nearly complete in my mind. It only made sense to go ahead and get it down.

A decade working on the same book made me a better writer, which I attributed to that indescribable asset heard when discussing the masters of the craft—voice. The ability to make words do your bidding. It feels like a superpower, like a god power. As power tends to do, it made me cocky.

Most of the time spent rewriting The Road Cain Walks involved plowing through, as all the available writing advice recommends. Head down. Blinders on. Don’t stop for air until you’ve finished the draft. After my fourth attempt resulted in once again tossing it all out to start over, I came up with something better. I called it my 1 ½ draft method, and though I still use it, I have little doubt it’s what sputtered my writing engine to near failure.

The method is simple. For each chapter, I do a race-to-the-finish first draft and then stop to read what I’ve written, fixing any plot holes and editing issues as I go. In theory, this results in a clean and polished draft that’s almost ready for the world, lacking only the 3-month cooling break before making sure the story is the one I wanted to tell.

Southern Ouroboros was my guinea pig. As misguided as my concept of writing was at that point, the choice of novel was a great one. Since I’d already self-published the first book in the series (the series name is appropriately "The Long Way"), it would be a waste of time to even try to find an agent for the sequel, so I knew from the beginning I’d self-publish it too. That made the path clear: I just needed to write and edit it, then I’d have TWO books on the market before my “debut.” I’d found my voice, after all, so my dream career just needed time for me to get the words down before it launched.

Voice itself is a misleading concept, as is its twin sibling “artistic vision.” It puts too much weight on the romantic idea of art, that it’s only a matter of tapping that creative energy inside you and pouring it onto the page. I’m sure there are writers who have it that easy—whatever they touch turns to gold, their genius great enough to saturate every word they type. I’m equally sure they all have a natural understanding of the key ingredient most artists miss, one that sees their hopes floundering at the idea they weren’t creative enough.

In the yin and yang of art, the stormy power of creativity has its equal and opposite reaction: the boring, stuffy mechanics of craft and process. I’ve covered craft in an earlier post and here again recommend all aspiring authors read as much as possible on the subject. Process is trickier. Every writer will have their own methods to approach the writing and editing of their work. This entire blog is an effort to explain mine for the chance some other writer might find it helpful toward getting where they want to go.

I stumbled into my process and didn’t recognize it. The first version of The Road Cain Walks was in essence a polished first draft. In the second, I nailed most of the concepts of craft with no real knowledge of what I was doing—just that I was working to make the story better. Instead of polishing sentences, I was tossing them all out for better ones. It was a second draft, a true revision that elevated the original idea into deep space compared to where it started.

It was all there in front of me, but I still treated my 1.5 draft of Southern Ouroboros as if it was the final product. I went to the same beta readers who helped with The Road Cain Walks. Out of seven, I got two replies. One loved my writing; the other said it was not the sequel they expected. Guess who I listened to. I justified ignoring the negative feedback by convincing myself they were referring to where I took the story, which was very much foreshadowed at the end of the first book. Things were always going to get weird and would only get weirder over the rest of the series. Now, I believe what the reader meant was that it didn’t dive as deep into its characters, setting, or plot as The Road Cain Walks. I hadn’t spent enough time with it and didn’t love it nearly as much.

Southern Ouroboros cover

When I gave up on begging for feedback, I rage-published the book. I was dejected but determined and would have to self-publish anyway since it was the sequel to a mostly unknown self-published novel. So I contacted Justin for another cover, and he once again outshined the writing.

I was in the exact same place as the first time I published The Road Cain Walks and had learned nothing. Frustrated and clueless on what I was doing wrong, I didn’t invest a dime in promoting the book. “A handful of copies” is a generous estimate at its total sales.

Don’t bother looking for Southern Ouroboros, if your curious. I’ve taken it out of print along with The Road Cain Walks, but the sequel, at least the current version of it, won’t be added here to read. It needs a rewrite, so I’ll give it one. Though right now it may be a plot-level draft, it’s a plot I still very much believe in, and I intend to do it justice.

After spending 20 years writing about the same characters, I needed a break from the series. My next idea came from a list of around thirty-something plot lines I’d accumulated along the way. This one had developed further than the others, my mind wandering to it whenever it got the chance. It would be a total departure from what I’d written so far, a novel I’d be proud to call my debut.

It would be the one that changed me.