Serialised Drafting in the Nude

A immodest proposal

Hello my faithful subscribers.

I am gearing up to draft book 5 in my Our Vitreous Womb series and contemplating ways to change my writing process.

When I wrote book 1-4 I set aside the mornings over a month to pour out the 40 thousand word instalments. I convinced myself that this was the only way to immerse myself deeply in the world I was creating. It also helped I was burnt out on farm work at the time so it gave me an excuse for a prolonged holiday inside my own head.

Since that phase in life my routines have stabilised. I’m comfortable writing a weekly nonfiction post for Zero Input Agriculture, which normally takes a day or two (outside of reading time for book reviews). The associated podcast looks like it will consume two dedicated months a year to do interviews, while narrating old substack posts will take maybe one day a month. That leaves me with a fair bit of slack time that I could redirect into working on my fiction, and that is where you-all come in.

The plan is to draft for 2-3 mornings every week, then after a little light editing share my progress here on my Haldane B Doyle Substack. Anyone interested is welcome to read along, make suggestions and comments, and get a glimpse of how the sausage machine in my brain works. After a week I will take each instalment down (or if you twist my arm maybe put them all behind a paywall). It should translate into 3-5 thousand words per weekly post given my usual drafting output. The story is planned to come in at around 40 thousand words again, so it should take me 10 weeks to complete the draft, not that much more than the usual one month.

This book will take a pair of familiar characters from the first four books on a secret world changing mission through far future South and North America, among the last two surviving majority sapiens civilisations left on the planet.

Drop a comment if this sounds interesting to any of you. I’d be happy to share the process as long as I have at least one or two people who are keen to come along for the journey.