TTWPWB

wtf?

Today I want to talk to you about my new work in progress. It's a very slow work in progress, and I am not writing it on my computer. WHAT?! This makes no sense to me because my handwriting is awful, and yet this seems to be how things are progressing with this book. Slow, and in ways that I hadn't expected because alongside handwriting in journals, I've been using the Otter voice to text app.

I have never been able to do speech to text before - historically the apps have not been great at interpreting New Zealand accents (or other accents either), but Otter? Otter gets me. From the very first time I tried it I was really impressed by how well it did. Initially I was using it to make notes on the first draft of In the Earth's Embrace, the second book in my co-write series with Iris Beaglehole, but then one morning I was walking and I was hit with this scene. These words, and so I opened the app and I spoke into it. Slowly, not getting it perfect, but just speaking the very short scene and I got shivers. It was so great, and I am in love with that scene. I've gone on to write other snippets from different point of view characters in the same way and I almost think it's easier to get different voices for the characters that way because I'm talking in a different way, choosing different words and different things that the girls focus on. It was... exhilarating.

Writing by hand means that I'm taking it slow, thinking about word choice, having fun with that. I was working on the first piece and got to a point where I realized that there could be someone in the car waiting for this character, but I didn't know who it would be. So, I stopped and jotted down the different options and what would make them interesting, before picking one to roll with, and ended up being able to end that chapter on this huge reveal. I made all the notes in a different colour, so just took my time with it was so fun.

The biggest fear I have around this is that I'm paranoid as fuck about losing my work, and yet I can't seem to bring myself to transfer it all to word doc. I have with small bits typed up, but not everything, and currently there are bits of it in at least two different notebooks.

And then there are the speech to text notes, which I really need to transfer somewhere.

I've never had a project so spread out. I'm normally that gal who opens a word doc and writes something from start to finish.

But not this time.

Oh, what if I write each character's stuff in their own notebook? Is that just an excuse to get more notebooks? What if I write diary entries? Ooooo. Now that's given me another idea.

I've known for a long time that TIME is what my brain needs - space to think things through, to work stuff out - but the push of indie publishing is that you always need to be doing more, putting out another book, having something on the horizon. The sooner the better.

Of course, burning out - AGAIN - was a great reminder to me that I'm never going to be that person again and if I so much as think about it too hard I'll be slammed back into bed so hard my hair follicles will hurt, and I'll feel each tooth aching individually.

I've seen on YouTube that people use the letters of the title to refer to their book and at present, the title is LONG, literally the longest I've ever had, but we're going to call it TTWPWB. It's a young adult horror full of what I consider to be delicious things. It deals with sexual harassment by a teacher (drawing from my own experiences) at a private school on an island (obviously not from my experience). It's told from five different girl's points of views and is the most complex thing I've ever worked on.

There is a lot of body horror with the way that our bodies change and how sometimes they don't feel like our own when others take them and use them in ways we don't consent to, we naturally have female rage, and the monstrification of the girls in various ways. Revenge, of course. Secrets, and the intense teenage friendships that are both nurturing and toxic at the same time. Obsession, possession, regression. There are too many things that this book is to be able to explain them all, and while it's full of dark, difficult, triggering, awful things, it also lights me up in ways I haven't felt in a long time.

Because I think my best work is work that draws from the well of my own pain, my personal rage, my unique worldview - those are the things that make me an individual, those are the things I can bring in a way only I can write, so I might as well make the most of them. They also are where I draw my strength from when it comes to writing the so called 'book of my heart'.

Butcherbird was that book, and now... now TTWPWB is. There will be many other books of my heart, I am sure, and the more heart I give to my books, the more I love them - and the more my readers love them too, I think. I hope.

Oh, and in case any of you were wondering - will I be writing this whole damn book by hand and voice? Gods, I hope not. But you never know, do you? And I'm just going to let the story show me where it wants to go.

Until next time! I'll be the one rolling around in this book like a dog in a fresh corpse. It feels amazing to be so in love with a project, and hopefully recording some of that love will help remind me of those feelings when I'm stuck in the mires and can't see my way out.

*This post has also been made into a video for my YouTube channel, and while I was kind of going off this post, it no doubt differs in some ways - you can check that out here if you’re interested. FYI, I don’t have the spoons to edit videos, so you get me in all my messy glory! lol)