I passed the milestone of 100,000 words for The Gryphon Clerks on the weekend.

That doesn’t count several spinoff short stories that I’m writing and submitting to various places, to practice my writing skills (and get my name out there, and develop some interesting bits of the world and the story that aren’t central enough to go in the novel).

I haven’t mentioned this here on the blog, but my thinking at the moment is that this is one big book rather than several smaller ones. That’s subject to revision, of course, like everything else. It neatly solves the title question, though. One thick book, The Gryphon Clerks.

I’ve reached a difficult point, in terms of motivation. About a third of the way through I did an outline, which I’m now working to. It has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, it’s relatively easy to think of what to write about, because I already thought about that. I just have to sit down and do it.

On the downside, that isn’t as much fun as just wandering about discovering things.

Also, I’m now in the part of the book with a lot of conflict, and I don’t really like writing conflict that much. I’m very soft-hearted towards my characters, to the detriment of my writing. A character who I like quite a lot is about to go through some tough times, and even though it’s going to lead to good things for him, and I know that, he doesn’t know it and I hate to do that to him (and to other people who aren’t going to be as fortunate).

Another plus of the outline, though, is that when I’m stuck on one bit I can write another bit instead.

I do feel like I’m kind of ploughing through at the moment, not knowing if it’s any good, sometimes resorting to “rich outlining” (my term for telling the story rather than showing it – I’ll go back later and replace the bare narrative of events with dialogue and action). I estimate that I’ll probably hit about 150K by the time I’ve got through the whole outline and expanded it up.

That’s long for a novel, though I’m told that Patrick Rothfuss’s novels are about 400K (they don’t seem like it, they’re so involving). I may need to trim some stuff that doesn’t contribute to the main story. (It can potentially become short stories, of course, or a novella occurring parallel to the main novel.) Maybe even combine a couple of characters, because so far some of them haven’t done very much, though again they can have their own stories off to the side later on.

After I get through the whole outline, and expand my “rich outlines” into proper storytelling, comes revision. I think of this as the process of getting from the “pig draft” to the “goat draft”: it still stinks, but it’s not as ugly.

Somewhere either before or after the goat draft stage, I want to submit it to a small press I have my eye on. They ask for the first 15,000 words as a sample, which (I worked out) goes up to the end of Berry’s story, before anyone else tells their backstory. I’m already reasonably happy with that, so it may go out while a lot of the rest of the book is still in pig draft, or even before I finish expanding the rich outlines.

I suppose I could even do it now. I don’t think I will, though. Events later on will affect the characterization of Victory, who’s one of the first two characters we meet, and I want to loop back round and sow the seeds of continuity back in those early chapters once the end is written.

Plus I’m nervous about submitting, of course.

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.