rhysnrivers

[rhysnrivers]

Odyssey to becoming a Published Author

(Note: with Odyssey being in the title, this is quite a long post.  The link to the facebook page that leads to where my novel can be bought from can be found at the bottom of the post, as can some of the initial artwork done)

So, despite never been a ‘blogger’ per se before, I’ve decided to write this article about my journey from having dreamed about writing and having my own works published, through to actually writing my ideas up and publishing them myself, as I’m sure that there are many an indie author and authoress out there who can relate and have been through the very same journey I have.

First thing’s first.  Rhys N Rivers is not my real name.  It’s a pen name.  There’s something in being anonymous when it comes to writing, almost like a sense of freedom.  This day and age of social media means that almost everything we do is recorded somewhere on the internet, and an opinion or action from ten years ago can be drudged back up to be ridiculed by the Facebook jury and/or the Karens of the internet, in line with the fashionable opinions of the day.  A pen name grants anonymity and to some degree, security.  The only people who know my identity are my immediate family and a few close, trusted friends.

When people embark on a new venture; be it a new hobby, learning a new language, travelling the world, changing jobs etc, the journey actually begins long before said venture starts.  Quite often, the journey always begins in the classroom, at home, in bed, in daydreams.  It begins as a state of ambition.  A plan that one day, will be put into action.

My authoring journey was no different.  Mine actually began around the age of eleven.  I was of the Harry Potter generation where I was the same age as the main characters in the early years when a new film came out each year.  J.K. Rowling got me into reading beyond in school, and I - being one of the cool kids, clearly - read a lot throughout my early and mid teenage years.  It was admittedly predominantly fantasy based, (Tolkien, Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Garth Nix) or Bernard Cornwall’s historical works before I branched out into people like Wilbur Smith and others.  When I was around 14 or 15, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code took the world by storm and I also ended up reading all of his works. School provided a sophisticated reading list, which included Dickens and Golding, and so growing I had read through a rich and broad variety of fiction.

Where actually writing was concerned, I think it was about the age of eleven or twelve that I realised that I wanted to write properly.  I think it was actually after reading William Nicholson’s Wind Singer when I decided, and I set to task in writing coming up with a fantasy novel.  I didn’t start writing the plot straight away; I actually started coming up with characters and places, even drawing out a world map.  That was really fun to do.  It had a sense of total control to it.  What I decided was what things were.  Where a kid may not feel in control of things in other parts of life (insecurities of school, friends, growing up, relationships etc), this was something totally different.  The ability to create your own fictional world, in whatever genre you go for, is a form of escape and release in which you can develop your talents and ideas.  

There were lots of elements to what I was planning out - which included ideas from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Legend of Zelda, The Wind on Fire among others.  To be honest, I’m actually glad that ‘project’ didn’t get very far.  Poor Christopher Paolini, the author of the Inheritance Cycle quadrilogy of books, was slated by certain groups and reviewers for his alleged lack of originality and using of ideas from other stories.  In Paolini’s defence, he was only fifteen when his first book was published, which is something that most fifteen year olds don’t achieve!  But I think that had I completed mine, it might have faced the same criticisms - not necessarily from reviewers or publishers, but perhaps friends and family reading through it first.

School, in particular, provided me with a lot of enthusiasm and inspiration to write (clearly, I was one of the cool kids).  My GCSE English teacher was a great bloke (probably still is) and gave great, honest and constructive feedback to the entire class’ work.  Our first piece of English Literature coursework was a piece on creative writing and I elected to do a piece on the topic of an opening chapter/opening chapters to a novel.  Having just read Dan Brown I did my piece in his sort of style: bloke copping it at the start, trying to prevent some conspiracy from going ahead, then the reluctant hero of the story gets dragged in to solving it.  My piece didn’t revolve around religious groups or secret societies, but around a historical artefact.

Out of 54 marks, this scored 52.  I was more than happy with that.  I had no idea where the story was going to go but I was determined that I would one day finish the story.  To this day, I still have no idea where the story is going, but I am certain that it will be the last novel of a set of three, dragging the main character, a desperately-can’t-wait-to-retire detective, through painstaking research, learning about history that he wouldn’t usually be arsed about and running away from people, of whom he’s becoming more and more of an embuggerance (word-invention credited to Terry Pratchett) to.

For some reason, I really can’t remember why, but about a year later the option was given to my English class to rewrite that piece of coursework (we were about four out of five coursework pieces done by that time).  I was of course happy with my score but I saw this as an opportunity to try something new and see what ideas could again come spewing from my mind.

This time, again sticking with the opening chapter(s) option, I wrote about a start of a medieval conspiracy, beginning around the Battle of Crécy and going…err…I still have no idea where!  But this piece resonated better than the previous piece, earning full marks from my English teacher, along with the comments “…should come with an 18 rated certificate.”  Again, I vowed that I would complete this story one day and see it published.  This one I think I will try to make into a three-book story.

The summer after completing my GCSE exams I did the normal stuff: went on holiday with family, chilled out with friends, even attended the World Scout Jamboree that year.  But I also by then had a set of ideas in my head that I wanted to turn into novels, and wrote that list onto a computer, and saved it to my USB memory stick.  I have no idea where I last saw that USB stick…

After I left school I joined the British Armed Forces.  I’m not going to write too much about what I did, where I went etc (not because I was part of some uber-top-secret unit, but more-so that it just doesn’t contribute to this post) but my priorities changed.  I read a lot less and writing properly in the near term future just was not a possibility, or something that I wanted to concentrate on at that time.

In early 2017 I was considering a career change, and during that time I joined fanstory.com, under my real name.  The purpose of doing this was to put myself into an environment with other amateur writers, gain inspiration from other budding authors (and hopefully give some inspiration back), and be in a place where my works could be read among ‘peers’, giving me a good steer on things.

It was on this website where my first novel, Payment, was conceived.  There was a competition going for short stories up to 7000 words long in the horror genre (“Put your readers on edge or terrorize them”) and so I thought this was a good place to test out to see what people think and to  develop my writing style.

It took me a couple of weeks to put Payment together and submit it.  I had never considered writing horror before but this, again, was an ample opportunity to try something new and see what I could come up with.  I decided to go with a 19th Century narrative; much like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.  I prefer to think or the horror genre as the old neo-gothic styles of writing - the old ghost stories.  Horror, in recent years, both in writing and film-making, has taken more of a gore and shock factor turn.  Personally, I think that will turn horror more into the thriller genre.  To me, horror should be about ghosts, vampires, witches - the occult and the supernatural.  And that’s that I have tried to achieve with Payment. 

What surprised me the most during the writing of this were my decisions to use the first-person narrative - something I used to despise growing up, and the use of a one-word title.  For some reason it used to bug me no end that it was becoming more and more common that artistic projects, be they novels, films, dance, visual art etc, would use one-worded titles.  I used to think that was a cop-out.  But here I am with Payment - a novel told in first-person narrative…

I have always thought that my writing style was/is closest to Terry Pratchett’s.  I’ve never tried to emulate him but his style of using irony, dry humour and satire, whilst also plummeting to some very deep philosophical ideas.  But I couldn’t do that whilst writing Payment.  The thing is with writing horror, is that you have to be able to maintain that macabre atmosphere all the through.  That actually isn’t easy.  I found there always has to be a sense of the character’s isolation, a sense of doom and gloom, and a sense of something about to happen.  

I didn’t win the completion that I entered.  I don’t think it even made the top three.  The votes are cast by the other entries’ writers and maybe a few other people.  I can’t remember if you could vote for your own project but I think you could.  The entries placed above mine, although I thought their storylines familiar with ideas already done, were admittedly much easier to read than my entry.  A 19th century style of writing will always lose to simplicity when people have a number of works to read.

But that didn’t deter me.  I’d created a fictional work and was determined to show it to the world.  I didn’t go ahead with the career change at that point but decided to fully review Payment, at get it out there as a completed project.

Fanstory is a good platform, it really is.  I’m not sure why, but after only a couple of months and having written a few competition entries, I came to stop writing on it.  My old job was getting in the way and to be honest, I was getting impatient with writing on it.  I had the mentality that I wanted to be published right now sort of thing.

A couple of years later, I did go ahead in a change of direction career-wise.  This provided the opportunity to fully revise Payment and make it into a ‘novelette’, more than 7000/7500 words but fewer than 17,500.  I would then prepare it for editing, get the artwork sorted and then publish it online for maybe a couple of quid.

I was actually in Tanzania at the time when I thought that Payment had been expanded enough to put out as a novelette.  Once I’d finished writing, I showed it to a couple of the volunteers I was working with and they both enjoyed it.  Although I was pleased about that, I still wasn’t satisfied with it.  I had touched on quite a few themes in the work but I don’t feel like I had explored them all as much as I could have.  Although complete, it felt very much incomplete.  At the same time I wanted to expand the work into a full novel and also I didn’t - mainly because of the challenge of maintaining that horror atmosphere.

I decided that, in order to put more meat onto the bones and develop this short story/novelette into a full length novel, I needed a goal to work towards; something that has an end achievement that will make me work to expand on what I had already done.  And so I set about looking for horror writing groups and/or competitions on the internet. 

In not much time at all I came across the Horror Writers Association (HWA).  They are a group that cater for all things horror and occult in fiction.  There, you can advertise your works, read or recommend other people’s works and learn about events - namely the StokerCon.

But what attracted me to them the most was their sponsorship of the Bram Stoker Awards (“for Superior Achievement”).  These are awards that are given out to authors and authoresses who have had their works judged in certain categories.  The one that has caught my eye is the ‘First Novel’ category.  A quick reading of the rules informed me of the minimal word limit:  40,00 words.  Perfect.  There’s something to work towards, with a chance at winning what is described as ‘the Oscars of horror writing’.  When I returned from Africa I set about the task of bolstering a 17,000-ish novelette into a 40,000 word minimum horror novel!

I have read Edgar Allan Poe in the past, and even bits of Mary Shelley.  For more inspiration in keeping that spooky, Neo-Gothic atmosphere, I read some parts of Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft.  Despite all of that, I initially found it difficult to write again on the same piece of work that I started almost three years previously.  It was only after reading Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, where I became inspired by her power of description to turn chapters, paragraphs and sentences that belong in quick short stories to ones suitable for a long read.

In January, this  year, I had finally finished.  I expanded heavily on the ideas that I was before concerned that I was rushing through and before I knew it, my word count was well over the 40,000 words I wanted to achieve!  I read it all again myself, edited out any spelling or grammar mistakes that I had seen, and sent it out to beta testers (readers) for opinions and editing.

Following the last edit - of which there wasn’t relatively much to do - my debut novel stands at a word count of 53,850 words!  That isn’t considered very long by today’s standards.  To give a point of reference, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is estimated to be around 77,000 words long (depending on who is doing the word count).  But my novel is longer than The Woman in Black as well as other novels such as The Great Gatsby and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and considering it came from a short story of 7,000 words I am still happy with it.

Concurrently with writing the novel came the task of finding an artist/illustrator for the cover.  That was a more difficult task than I expected.

Not only did I want to find someone who could create a suitable cover, I also wanted that someone to be able to do ‘scene art’; by which I mean a picture at the start of certain chapters.  The reason for this is that I see a completed novel itself as a form of art, and scene pictures add to that completed projected.  In fact, I actually wanted a sort of teamwork between the writing/art found in the Edge Chronicles books by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell.  

I combed Facebook for a very long time, joining all sorts of groups and pages for amateur artists to show off their works, hoping to find someone who I thought was suitable for my work.  To my dismay, there was very little, I thought, that I could go off.

Around October time I put an advert on a freelancing work website, just for an idea of who else is out there and possibly able to take this up.  I did receive a fair few responses but, again, there wasn’t really anyone whose work suited what I was after.  A couple of them, one of them being an art company based in Central Asia, actually got quite nasty about it.  They were expectant 

It was when I was on a course in Spain that it was suggested to me to look on Reddit, as Reddit “literally has everything on it.”  I had never actually been a proper Reddit user before; I’d clicked the odd link from Facebook but had never really interacted with it before. 

The guy who suggested Reddit to me was right - Reddit has literally everything on it.  There’s so much information to be found on so many topics it seemed unlikely that I wouldn’t find what I was looking for on it, and so I combed through a few sub-reddits dedicated to (freelance) artists and checked some of them out.

So I once again posted out an advert looking for artists and this time the response were much more positive, and enthusiastic!  It really was quite uplifting to see and hear from so many people who were interested in taking up the project and I received so many messages.  Everyone who commented on the post and/or messaged me with links to their portfolios, I checked out their work.  I honestly don’t think there was a single person whose works of art that I wasn’t impressed by.  There is so much that can be found at deviantart.com and artstation.com and so much talent to be viewed and be in awe at!  Everyone who directly messaged me got a return thanking them.

One of the people I got talking to was a young lad from Sweden called Daniel Percy, whose artwork I also checked out.  My preferences came down to him and another guy from Germany, and after speaking with Daniel he agreed to take on the work.

Daniel does a lot of freelance art work, predominately doing concept art work for electronics companies (I want to say video games but don’t take that as gospel), but he still found the time to do this properly, compiling several drafts of the cover and inside sketches.  We collaborated quite often on what to change, ideas to put in etc.

The finished artwork is incredible!  I’m showing some of the initial first-sketch ideas here along with the final book cover, along with a couple of since-altered scene pictures, just for an idea of his talent.  You’ll have to buy the book to see all of the finished sketches ;)

And the final thing to think/worry/mull over until stupid o’ clock in the morning, was the publishing aspect.  Luckily, ever since I’ve thought about writing (as an adult), it has become increasingly easier to get your works out there.  The rise of the internet and social media age has made self publishing so much more accessible, and that is the route I have gone down.

At first, I wanted to go down the traditional printing route.  I - again showing cool I was as a kid - always liked the idea of a fresh and printed book in my hands.  But, there are two reasons why I haven’t done this:

The first one is environmental.  Even before the climate change debate became a fashionable thing to signal your virtues about, I was uncomfortable about the idea of trees being cut down for my creation, unless I could be 100% certain that exact same area would be immediately replanted.  It’s true, there are forested areas specifically for this kind of thing but the amount of bureaucracy involved, along with the middle-men, wouldn’t make it an immediate thing.

The second reason is that the majority of writers who send their works in get rejected by so many publishers.  Yes, people refer to J.K. Rowling’s story of being rejected twelve times (and again later by one of the same publishers when she first wrote as Robert Galbraith) before Harry Potter became a hit, but as the option of the internet is there, it makes sense to negate that possible rejection.  In the event that my works do get noticed and attract the attention of publishers, then great!  But if they don’t, at least by online publishing, I’ve still achieved putting my novel out to the world.

Finally, today, Friday the 13th (intentionally - it is a horror novel after all ;p ) of March 2020, I officially became a published author.  It is a fantastic, monumental feeling.  My story, my novel, my creation, is out there for people to buy, read and hopefully, enjoy.

If there’s any advice that I can give for anyone aspiring to be an (indie) author, it is this: just write your ideas down.  Sounds simple, if not downright obvious, but it really is incredible that so many people don’t achieve their dreams or aspirations simply because they don’t do them.  The world of authoring and indie writing is so much more accessible now than it was even fifteen years ago, that is takes a great lot of effort not to find at least one platform to get your works out onto.

It is also incredibly easy to find every excuse in the book to not write at all.  School, work, family etc, being the big ones, and they are legitimate reasons.  But they are only obstacles themselves to an extent, before you yourself make them obstacles.  Start small.  Set yourself half an hour on an evening.  No more, no less.  Half an hour to start getting your ideas onto paper and then after a week, you’ve spent three and a half hours writing.  You’d be surprised at how much you’ve achieved after three and a half hours of concentrated effort.

If you need motivation, there are plenty of people out there, particularly on the internet, who give great examples of motivation that apply to all disciplines.  Joe Rogan, for just one example, has plenty of people on his podcasts who talk and give advice on self-betterment, and it can apply to anybody.  If you want to write, you will find the time and means to do it.  It doesn’t matter how long it takes; everybody finds their ways at different times. 

As to my next works, what am I going to be writing next?  Well, shortly after writing Payment as a short story I thought of another idea to write about, and use that particular project to actually develop my writing style.  This next one, of which the first ‘act’ as such does already have a skeleton outline to it, is a light hearted yet philosophical at times medieval adventure, combining humour and seriousness together.  I’m not going to divulge ay more information the storyline because, although it’s a simple idea, I believe it’s one that no-one’s done before and some smart-arse with more time on their hands than I can easily bash something together using my idea!

The school coursework pieces?  They are still on my ideas list and will no doubt be developed into their own proper projects and they hopefully will also be published just as Payment is!  The fantasy that I started aged eleven?  Absolutely no idea.  Whilst I would certainly like to do fantasy, going for originality is going to be difficult, as the standard format (young hero finds out he’s the ‘chosen one’ and goes on a long quest) has been done to death, as have a lot of fantasy ideas already.  George R R Martin had the idea of using the idea of old English houses warring against other in the past, and that was used to great effect even before he threw in the ice zombies!  So that one is going to be a case of properly allocating some time to sit down, think and decide how I’m going to go about, but make no mistake, I will go about it!

Thank you all for taking the time to read through this!  I hope its provided at least some entertainment or light (ha!) reading, and I hope you’ll feel interested to buy my debut novel!

My Facebook page can be found at:  

https://m.facebook.com/Rhys-N-Rivers-Writing-101015961412385/?ref=bookmarks

All the places where Payment can be bought from can be found there.  I thought it better to post one central link than the individual ones.