Why It Has Taken Me Nine Years to Write A Novel (Patreon)

The originally concept for the world that Scars of the Golden Dancer is set in came to me in 2010. The year before, Eurofurence’s theme was the Arabian Nights, and I recall looking at some of the art for the con and being fascinated by it. A specific piece of art with a fennec prince caught my intention, and it stuck with me. I wanted to read a story like this, but no such story existed that I knew of, so I decided at some point to write a novel about a fennec prince. I started working on a story about a sultan’s second son.

The Middle East has interested me for years, but I knew very little about it then. I’d played a lot of the Civilization games, but just having an idea and an aesthetic wasn’t enough. I needed to know details about the culture, and what existed in this world I was creating. Invariably, after about 6,500 words, things stalled out. I didn’t understand the world well enough. I had quickly come up with two characters and a conflict, but this conflict comes at a very serious point in their journey. I didn’t know who they were, and I didn’t know enough about the world they inhabited. I decided instead to write a short story about these two characters and how they met. I did that, and since this was an adult story, I submitted it to Heat. It was, for good reasons rejected.

That rejection stung. The acceptance I hoped that would help me launch this setting was not happening, but I was not to be deterred. I still wanted to tell this story, but I also still needed to better understand the setting. Instead of working with royalty, I opted to write about the salt of the earth people in the setting. I hoped it would provide me with some perspective. During the writing process, I decided to leave the capital of the sultanate and set this story in a small village beyond the sultanate. Thus in 2011, I wrote a story about a hyena sellsword called Naji and a jackal prostitute called Zayn. This was again a boy meet boy story, and I again submitted it to Heat. Thankfully, it was also rejected.

Failure is a reward in of itself, sometimes. Even before I received the rejection, I knew I wanted to write more about Naji and Zayn. I started toying around with a sequel story. Something set in Aksu, the capital of this sultanate, but this time with Naji and Zayn. The previous story had ended with them heading there, so why not write a story about that? It even tied it in to the original novel I wanted to write by borrowed a location from the short story I wrote in 2010, a place called the Blue Lantern. With my now rejected short story, in late 2011, I started contemplating a novella, tying these two pieces together. If I could make this 30,000 words, I could sell it.

I had at that time never attempted a novel before, but I worked on it for a while. I worked on various short stories too during this time period, going back to add bits and pieces to the novella when not doing anthology writing, trying to figure out how to make this work. The word count grew, and the concept shifted from being a novella to being a novel. I’m not sure exactly where I left it before it stalled out, but I believe I got it over 25,000 words. It became the longest thing I had ever written to date, but it was not done. So in 2015, I decided to do Camp NaNoWriMo. I was going to write 30,000 words in a month and finish it. I was going to have a novel! Surprisingly, I did just that the allotted time without any semblance of a coherent plan. I pantsed the entire second half of the novel. I think I actually wrote 35,000 words. The experience was intense, but the people in that cabin were fun to work with. They had projects to do, and I had a project to do, and I was not going to be deterred. This is also how I met some of the writers I still talk to today.

I finally had my first novel. It wasn’t the novel with the characters I set out to write about, but it was a novel in that setting. All I needed to do now was edit it. Reality at some point set in. Editing a novel is no easy feat, especially one written without an outline, and with half of it written quickly on the fly. Even worse, the quality of the prose was uneven. This first complete version of the book had eighteen chapters. I have a file dated from early 2016 that is 68,952 words long. It was short for a novel, but I thought I might be able to find a publisher for it at some point. I kept poked at it a little by little, but the process was slow going. It wasn’t the only thing I was worked on either.

I have long considered the content of this novel a hard sell in the furry fandom. It’s not the Middle East as we know it exactly, but it draws heavily form the region. I became concerned if I had captured the setting well and the pit falls of orientalism. To push back my fears, I stated doing more research to get things right. I started building up the world in general, but how well a book like this will fare in the furry writing market is not something I’ve yet to ascertain. At times I’ve dealt with the problem of my fears about the book and the concept by just not working on it at all and doing something else. I don’t want this to be a horrible mess that goes down in furry history as a “shitty orientialist take” on the Middle East. I’ve also increasingly felt I am staking my reputation as a writer on the back of a jackal prostitute.

The world around me has been changing too. Even when I started this in 2010, I knew writing a story that felt Middle Eastern would be alienating for some readers. With the memory of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on people’s minds, how would people respond to a story so outside of what people expect in furry writing. Even worse, people in the last few years have been angry that the world is changing, and I feel we’re currently seeing a backlash against internationalism, especially economic globalism. Fear is the mind killer, but I kept at it Not all the time, but I kept returning to work on the project. Progress was slow, but continued to happen. And then, we elected Donald Trump as president of the United States.

November 2016 is one of those moments where it feels like the course of history changed. I suddenly had serious concerns on where the United States was going, and I wasn’t the only one. The mood of many of my friends turned dark, and people became increasingly political on social media. I had pondered doing a dystopian anthology before, but in that moment, I wanted to tackled all the concerns I saw going by in a way I felt was constructive. Thus, in late November 2016, I started laying the ground work for a dystopian furry anthology. I again, put the novel aside, got a co-editor and dug into the process of putting together a collection. This book, Dissident Signals, was released in 2018 through FurPlanet.

Along with working on the anthology, I attended the Regional Anthropomorphic Writers Retreat (RAWR) in 2017, and I’ve continued to write short stories. I got to the back half of the novel after Dissident Signals wrapped up, hoping to finish in 2018. Unfortunately, the last half of the novel was a mess, and writing it so fast did not help. Some if was at times repetitive and choppy. I decided a critical restructure was needed. I reduced the number of chapters from eighteen to sixteen. My goal of finishing in 2018 slipped away, although I did at the end of the year finally wrangle the major plot points together in the back part of the novel. I’ve had a friend who I’ve seen sending chapters to as I’ve finished them, in what is the slowest beta read process I’ve ever asked someone to do. I can say that to date all but the last two have now gone to him. I’ve published, since I started working with this setting, twenty-two short stories in various anthologies and written two additional short stories in the setting. One of those stories, “Silk and Sword,” I did successfully sell. It came out in FANG Volume 9 this year at Anthrocon.

I believe what’s left to do is polishing. The book has also grown during all this work to almost 90,000 words. This has taken an inordinate amount of time to complete and the amount of research I’ve put in to date is extensive. Even worse, there is more I still would like to do. I’ve read books and articles on various topics to better capture the feel of the world. I’m pushing to finish this thing this year, but further delays may come up. Still, I’m closing in on sending it to a publisher. I just need to finish what I started.