The Bittersweetness of a Finished Draft
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
If you're wondering about the results of last week's poll, I can't tell you yet - we still have one more day before it closes! There's still time to vote if you didn't yet!
In the meantime, some news:
Last night I sent the final draft chapter of a secondary world fantasy WIP to my alpha readers.
I can't tell you much about the book yet! At this stage, I want to be careful and humble and maybe a little cagey. A first draft is less like a novel and more like a novel’s blurry outline. I need to put it together into a nice file and show it to my agent, then do a few rounds of revisions based on her feedback and my other readers. Then we'll package it up and send it out to publishers, and if we're lucky one of them will want to publish this thing, at which point there will be more rounds of revisions to do and other arrangements which are done behind closed doors before readers even get an official peek at what the project will be. (If we're not lucky, I might self-publish, but that requires a whole other set of rounds of different things.) Even in the best case, each of these phases will take months, and any of them could change the book so drastically that anything I tell you about it now will become a lie.
Still, you guys are my faithful supporters, so I can give you a few tidbits:
It's very queer, and in particular, very trans; it’s basically a trans coming-of-age story, and there’s a lot in it about the queer and neurodivergent feeling that you’ll never be a real adult no matter what you do.
It's not set in generic Ye Olde Medieval Europe. It’s not meant to resemble any real or historical Earth culture very closely, but let’s just say I’ve been doing a lot of research about nomadic pastoralists.
There is some delighfully weird magic, including psychedelic initiatory visions and a Faustian deal with a spirit who isn’t necessarily evil in the Christian sense, but who definitely has her own agenda.
Also dragons. There are dragons here.
The current working title is MOTHER DRAGON.
One of the early impulses that led to this story is the advice my agent gave me after I puzzled over reviews for THE OUTSIDE. The best thing I could do to level up my writing, she said, was to get better at worldbuilding - not the high-concept stuff, which THE OUTSIDE already had, but the kinds of details and atmosphere that give readers the feel of a place.
So I worked on that, and early feedback from my alpha readers says I got that part right. I'm getting compliments on how cozy and nice it feels to read about the clothes, landscapes, animals, even the food - which is definitely not a set of compliments I ever got for THE OUTSIDE. One of them keeps saying it feels like a Studio Ghibli movie! (Though I wouldn't call MOTHER DRAGON a "cozy book" overall. The stakes aren't epic, but there is plenty of peril and angst!)
As I write this, I’m wondering why it’s so hard to write something celebratory about a draft that I feel proud of. You might have already noticed how I immediately had to qualify the announcement with all sorts of caveats, and the urge to do that continues unabated.
I don't know why I'm doing this, because honestly, I love this book and I enjoyed writing (the draft of) it. (See, there I go again.)
To put this achievement in context:
My process for how I manage my days and how I allocate time for writing is completely different now than it was for any of the Outside books. Some of this is for mental health reasons that I can't even describe here, but it's a thing.
When I finished my PhD, I got so burned out that it became almost impossible to write anything. (Except for goofy Star Wars fanfiction. I don’t know why that was the exception, but I wrote reams of it for a while and it helped keep me sane.) Yes, that was in 2018-2019. (In retrospect, a lot of the signs started even earlier; my mental breakdown in 2014 didn’t wash me out of grad school or authorhood, but it permanently changed some things.) Yes, I wrote THE FALLEN and THE INFINITE in the years since then and I'm glad I did, but let me tell you - it was hard as fuck and I did not enjoy much of the process. I made improvements in my life which started around late 2020-early 2021, but I didn't start to consistently get my original fiction mojo back until THE INFINITE's last few chapters. In the beginning of 2022. That's a long damn time to worry that something in your creative life may have permanently gone away.
I really did enjoy writing MOTHER DRAGON. There were parts that were more emotionally difficult because of their content, and times when I had to step away for a while because I was dealing with a boss fight in therapy, but for the most part, this was genuinely fun and cool and fulfilling. If it never gets published, I'd be disappointed, but I'd still feel like I had a good time.
The drafting process took about a year, which is not super-fast, but it is the fastest I've ever drafted a potentially publishable original novel. This is despite the aforementioned pauses and despite the fact that I was also wandering away, whenever I felt like it, to fool around with other projects. (See above re: different process.)
So this is a huge milestone and I'm proud of myself. At least I think I see pride, shining patiently, somewhere down there amid the other feelings.
But I've noticed that, lately, when I hit a milestone like this, there's a sense of melancholy. I look back at how far I've come and some of the swamps I've crawled out of, and I'm like, wait, that sucked, actually. That sucked for a long time.
It’s a paradox of an emotion - it means things have genuinely improved - but somehow, the past tense hits different from the present. And the past is also a bit of a memento mori. In times like these, who among us can confidently say that they’ll never burn out or break down again?
Still: I wrote a draft! This is good! Icecream! Confetti!
I hope I can share it with all of you soon.