J. A. Bradley

Last night I finished the first draft of DEVOID, the sister novel to UNWELCOME.

Fuck. Yes.

I tracked the hell out of this one as a way to keep myself motivated, accountable, and on-schedule. I thought it might be cool to post some metrics here for posterity’s sake, especially given how wildly different this has been from the meandering “this is just a hobby” (but not really) drafts I’ve completed in the past.

Just to be clear, there’s lots of work still ahead. While I’m no pantser, I did deviate significantly from my original outline, and now that I’ve finished the initial draft there’s things to change. I can’t wait.

Planning & Outlining: Quantified Goalposts

I spent two weeks outlining up front, starting with a one-page synopsis. The synopsis I expanded into rough chapter-level breakdowns. We’re talking bullet-points here for major beats within each scene, and maybe one-off details I knew I wanted to capture. The intent was to give myself some goalposts, but allow freedom in how I traversed between them.

As for the structure, I wanted to shoot for ~84,000 words in length, with each chapter clocking at around 3,000. That meant 28 chapters for me to lay the plot over. I tend to work better when I set a framework for myself, and quantifying my targets in this way helped me set a schedule that I could keep to. It worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

I set an aggressive deadline for myself of July 1st, which I did not hit. Lesson learned there: Review the calendar ahead of time and make sure you account for planned vacations and buffer for the unexpected. I also didn’t account for the fact that I’d need to ramp up to start hitting target word counts.

The Writing Schedule

I’ve always been a morning person. My first two novels were largely completed in the wee hours, before kids woke and without the exhaustion of the day to weigh me down. Unfortunately, you can only get up so early, and I wanted to avoid forced stops when the day started before I was ready to quit writing.

So I wrote in the evenings. Kids to bed, a brief show or two with my wife, and then write. Typically that started around 9PM.

Things started slow. I averaged less than 500 words a session. That sucked. But over time I started to hit my stride again. The best analog I can come up with is going to the gym. Rarely do you go to the gym because you’re looking forward to tearing muscles and exertion. But the more you go the easier it gets. Habits are your friend when it comes to long-term projects. By the end, I was hitting 500+ words per hour on good nights, and often had free time to watch a show or play a video game after the day’s writing was done.

I also took weekends off, for the most part, leaving Friday and Saturday nights to decompress. Usually, I took myself up on that. I love my free time. But occasionally the bug still got me, and I returned to my computer even though it wasn’t on the schedule.

I finished the first draft of DEVOID in 82 sessions with a final average of just over 1,000 words per. Right now it clocks in at 82,333 words. That final count is under my initial target, but close to the end I made some minor structural changes to the framing narrative, so that’s acceptable for now.

The start date (after outlining) was 3/18/21. Last night, 7/20/21, I wrapped up the epilogue and poured myself a tall whiskey to celebrate. Four months for a first draft. Months.

The difference between that and the timelines for my earlier novels is staggering. TOUCHED (an 84,000 word dark fantasy that is deserves the dust it gathers) took me five years. UNWELCOME, which netted me an agent, took three.

Hot damn.

Practically, I’d still budget six months for a draft–I won’t always be riding the high of getting signed–but the potential to make this schedule and output repeatable is exciting in and of itself. None of what I pushed for here was unsustainable, and the possibilities for the next projects are exciting as all hell. Right now this well goes deep.

It’s been quiet here, but that’s by design.

This space is intended to be focused on news, specifically updates on the writing and publishing front. After “What Adam Said” made it into Space and Time, I decided to focus fully on novels. The dream has always been to write books and then go the traditional (trade) route for publication.

I finished my first novel in 2014, a dark fantasy called TOUCHED. It took something like ten years to write. There were some genuinely cool moments and characters, but the prose is shit. Absolute, utter shit. Embarrassing, even. It’s been sealed up behind a wall of bricks without food or light. Sometimes I hear it scratching at the walls. Maybe someday I’ll break it free to harvest some organs.

So I wrote a second novel. UNWELCOME is a dark thriller with an aggressive plot and a speculative premise. It took five years to write, and I’m proud of that work. Even better, after a year of querying agents, it earned me a literary agent.

Holy shit.

Now we’re shopping the book around. Rejections come in. Nobody’s called me a hack (yet). I check my inbox maybe thirty thousand times a day. I’m so damn excited.

And here’s the super cool thing. I started writing a new book in March, a sort’ve sister to UNWELCOME. I’m on track to have a first draft by the end of the summer.

Ten years for the first. Five years for the second. Six months for the third. It’s a real testament to the power of motivation, and how a little recognition can drive it.

Here’s to hoping there’s more news to share here sometime soon.

It’s here!

Not only do we get to see my short story “What Adam Said” in print, but it’s got an illustration. An illustration! How cool is that? Props to Mark Levine for a portrayal that’s creepier than the story itself.

Hit the link below to the Space and Time subscriptions page, or just hit the cover image in the full post.

http://spaceandtimemagazine.com/wp/subscriptions/

I’m proud to announce that my short story “What Adam Said” has won the 2013 Graversen Award. A big thank you to the folks at Garden State Speculative Fiction Writers, and to Hildy Silverman of Space and Time magazine.

Thanks again!