It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since I published Karma’s Burden. I mentioned in another post, that the first surprise was that it sold, and not just to people I knew. I was always fairly certain that friends, family and a few sympathetic colleagues could be relied upon to buy a copy, if only to avoid an awkward conversation with me later, but strangers bought it too, which somehow made the whole thing feel much more real.
Some people liked it, some people really liked it, and a few people really hated it too. That last part took a little getting used to. There is quite a difference between understanding, in an abstract sense, that not everybody is going to like your book and discovering that an actual person has read something you spent years working on and genuinely thought it was awful. For a while, that was difficult to come to terms with, but eventually I did, largely because there isn’t really any alternative unless you intend to spend the rest of your writing life hiding manuscripts in a drawer.
There have also been some lovely comments. One person described Karma’s Burden as a cross between Scum and The Hunger Games, which was not a comparison I had ever considered, but one I am now perfectly happy to repeat whenever anybody asks me what sort of book it is.
One of my favourite moments, though, had nothing to do with reviews. I was sitting in a meeting at work which had descended, as meetings sometimes do, into a general moan about our parent company, when somebody looked across the table at me and said, “It feels like we’re all obligates here.”
That made me smile because there is something deeply satisfying about inventing a word for a fictional world and then hearing somebody casually use it to describe the real one.
Okay, so back to that question, which people have started asking me with increasing regularity: where is the damn sequel, Philip?
The fact that people ask at all still surprises me. People genuinely want to know what happened after the end of Karma’s Burden. They want to know what happened to Sam, what became of the people around him, and what else is going on in that world.
The slightly awkward answer is that I have written the sequel, but at the moment I really don’t like it very much. Believe it or not this is actually an improvement. At one point I hated it so much I almost abandoned it completely.
Before I published Karma’s Burden, I had written about five other novels, none of which I ever felt confident enough to release. Even putting Karma’s Burden out there felt like throwing myself off a cliff and hoping there was something soft waiting at the bottom, but there was also a certain freedom in doing it. Nobody was waiting for the book. Nobody knew who Sam was, nobody knew what an obligate was, and nobody had any expectations about what kind of story they were about to read.
I read something once, although I can’t remember who said it, about how once you publish a book the characters and the world no longer entirely belong to you, and I think I understand that much better now. Once people have read a book, they begin to form their own relationship with it. They have their own ideas about the characters, their own favourite parts, their own unanswered questions and, in some cases, their own expectations about what should happen next.
That creates a kind of responsibility which did not exist when I was writing the first book. If somebody has finished Karma’s Burden wanting to know what happens next, I don’t want to give them something that feels like a weaker version of the book they enjoyed.
In that sense, writing the second book has been much harder than writing the first. Publishing Karma’s Burden may have felt like jumping off a cliff, but the prospect of publishing the sequel feels more like jumping off the same cliff while a small crowd stands at the bottom waiting to see whether I can somehow pull off a triple somersault on the way down.
So why do I currently dislike my sequel?
One reader told me that one of the things they particularly liked about Karma’s Burden was the pacing, and the way the revelations began to arrive faster and faster as the book progressed. That comment stayed with me because, when I went back and read the sequel again, I realised it was not doing the same thing.
The pacing was wrong, there was too much exposition, and too much of the book seemed to be explaining the world instead of allowing the story to reveal it naturally. The story itself was there, and there were characters and scenes I liked very much, but as a whole it simply was not working in the way I wanted it to. Eventually I had to admit that I was looking at another couple of rewrites at least.
So that, in short, is where the damn sequel is. It exists, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and there are parts of it I am very pleased with. There are also parts that are about to have a rather unpleasant encounter with the delete key.
I am working on it. I just want to make sure that when I eventually throw myself off that cliff for the second time, the somersault is at least vaguely convincing.