Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
I suppose the cat is sufficiently out of the bag for me to share this announcement from Grinning Skull Press. My novel Always Beside You is in the final proof stage. No publication date yet, but watch this space.
Always Beside You is my first novel, or rather, the first novel-length work that I thought might have the potential for publication. It grew from a few scenes and a rough plot I’d sketched out in early 2015: there were images and ideas aplenty, but I struggled with putting it all together into a coherent whole. By mid-2016, I had a completed manuscript. A slew of rejections made me rethink said manuscript. I kept submitting – at this point I was impervious, or at least inured, to rejection – and messing around with Always over the next year or so.
Then I sort of forgot about it. Or rather, made myself forget.
There were new projects occupying my attention (one of these would eventually become Kill Zone), magazines I wanted to crack (and still haven’t), anthologies I wanted to be part of. But at the bottom of it was fear.
One of the best pieces of advice on writing comes from the book On Writing by the incomparable Stephen King, and is what he terms the “drawer method”. You write a manuscript in a season or so, then stick it in a desk drawer and forget about it for at least six weeks before revisiting it. But King also warns against over-analysis: the longer you look at your story, the more thought you put into each sentence, the more glaring any faults or plot holes become, and the more likely you are to become discouraged.
When I finished Always Beside You, I felt very confident about getting it published. A decent first effort, well-paced and compelling enough to maintain the reader’s attention. But now the act of writing it was done. I had written two novel-length works before, and submitted them to publishers without expecting anything other than a polite rejection. This was different. If I really believed in this story, it was time to bring it up to publishable standard.
The more I revised the manuscript, the deeper my heart sank. I’d left it in the drawer for too long, and now saw only the bad parts. On the plus side, I also had three more years of writing and editing experience, of constructive feedback from editors. Further tinkering got the story accepted for publication; even more tinkering turned it into the finished product about to be released into the world. I’ll never write the perfect piece to satisfy my inner critic (I doubt any author ever will), but I’m proud and pleased to put my name on the cover, and immensely grateful to Michael Evans and Harrison Graves of Grinning Skull Press for believing in my story.
What better way to celebrate this novel, than to continue writing the next one?
Darker Realities 
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