Writing Tips 003 – Let yourself go loopy

The latest tip is to let yourself go mad.  Writing a book is seriously mind-bending.  I think I’ve probably aged myself about five years in the last one by focusing on writing so much (hopefully I can reset the clock by chilling out over the next few…).
I spent five years going down the write -> submit to agent -> get a teaser -> get a rejection route – I did have three agents express interest in GHOST, mind, which is pretty good going.  On one hand, it helped me get better as a writer (my first book was shite, my second was flawed) but it’s a really stressful and dispiriting process.  When I got my rejection from the agency I was banking on, I made myself determined to tear GHOST apart and restructure it based on their criticism.  I spent a few weeks replotting it and got it to a decent state, then I gave up when work became really busy in late 2010.
Last summer, I decided to go solo and publish with Amazon direct.  I picked GHOST up again and got it pretty far down the line.  But the following blog post shows where my head got to a year ago –
http://edjamesauthor.com/2011/09/04/polishing-a-turd/
Ironically, I quickly got fed up of DEVIL and had pretty much given up on writing.  I got encouraged by a mate – he’s a policeman – saying that my book was really fresh and told a different sort of story to the usual.  I picked GHOST up and changed the ending, fixed the problem with the baddie and so on.
If I hadn’t let myself have those loopy moments, I wouldn’t be as strong as I am now.  Losing your mojo is hard but you’ve got to find it again and there’s no point in pushing it when you can’t push it.  (I realise this may sound contradictory to WT002 but that’s about getting through the writing cycle much quicker).
Sometimes the turd needs polishing and you can always throw away the shitty hankie…
— Ed
Buy GHOST IN THE MACHINE –
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/IzknfQ