Starting off

Hello!

If you’re reading this - first off thank you! I started this website to promote my upcoming debut novel, The Spire War and my future projects.

I am planning on updating this blog periodically with updates on how work is progressing, topics on writing and literature and possibly other things as well - we’ll just see where it takes us.

So, a little bit about how we got here:

In 2019 I decided I was going to dig down and do what I’d been wanting to do for a very long time, namely give an honest-to-god try at writing and publishing a novel.

I have written one novel before in my early 20s (which has been read by no-one which is almost certainly for the best) and numerous short stories but now in my early 30s I felt that I was more able to do the proper prep work and mainly - all the damn thinking involved in writing a novel.

The basic idea for The Spire War had been growing in my mind for years that point. Its origins come, as so many of my ideas, from mucking about with odd bits on my desk. I am a chronic fiddler - if I’m not fiddling with something I start to get anxious. I consciously stay away from my wife’s expensive pens, knowing that if I’m not careful I’ll start taking them apart and will probably end up breaking them (and my wife has some very nice pens).

Originally the story was going to be about a terraforming project gone wrong - waves of gray goo chasing after terrified colonizers.

After that I began thinking about a story of a distant world fighting a civil war over access to an alien device, and that idea stuck with me and would eventually morph into what the novel is today.

But neither of those ideas to me was enough to build a novel around. Then, in 2019 I started combining them in my head. Spoiler alert? No, don’t worry: While there is a civil war going on (as revealed in the synopsis and on page one of the novel), both of these ideas changed beyond recognition by the time I was getting serious with the work.

Speaking of which:

I wrote scene lists, a timeline stretching quite a way both before and after the setting of the novel (said timeline changed oh I forget how many times since), a list of characters and quite a lot of notes about the universe. A lot of this in hindsight felt quite a superfluous as much of it I’ve since discarded or changed considerably - and it seems a common trap for other new writers: The world-building becomes secondary to the novel itself. But it helped me ground myself and try out ideas that, when I was writing the actual story, sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Or more often was just too much clutter. The novel is supposed to be an exciting story, not an info-dump.

Having worked out scene lists, timelines, a rough plan for a word count (which I ended up breaking through with almost half the novel left to go) I signed up for 2019’s Nanowrimo.

Nanowrimo (NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth) is a project where people sign up to finish a novel in a month (November) by writing 1667 words per day. By the end of the month you’ll have finished 50000 words, which by most accounts is a good amount for a complete novel (genre-dependant). It’s a wonderful project which has spawned several published novels over its lifetime, including An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green, Wool by Hugh Howey and Cinder by Marissa Meyer: All good reads.

I had participated in Nanowrimo before (successfully) and didn’t think I’d finish the actual novel during November, but it was a good motivator to keep me on track to get the whole thing up and running. And it worked: By the end of November 2019 I had a good 60000 words written which brought me roughly up to the end of the second act of the novel. They weren’t the best words; the whole point of Nanowrimo is to allow yourself to fart out words - it doesn’t matter if they’re good, the point is to get them written, but they were undeniably 60000 words. A good start.

That’s where I’ll leave it for now. Next time I’ll tell you the story of how I kept working on the first draft and how life got in the way as it tends to.

Until then, take care and thanks for reading!

/Pontus