I’m sitting here working on Book Two of the Karma’s Burden story, and it feels like a good time to stop for a moment and look backwards before pushing on again.
When I released Karma’s Burden, I set the bar embarrassingly low. If one person chose to read it and liked it, that would have been enough. That sounds ridiculous written down, but it was genuine. For someone as perpetually anxious and self-critical as me, that was honestly all I expected.
Then there was that first sale. Not to a friend. Not to someone I’d nudged or apologised to in advance. Just… a stranger. Someone, somewhere, found my book and decided to spend their time on it. That feeling hasn’t really gone away.
Four months later, around 130 people have chosen to read what I wrote. Some of them have been kind enough to leave ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. Around 30 people read it through Kindle Unlimited. These are small numbers in publishing terms, but they are not small to me.
Of course, new anxieties arrive immediately. They always do.
The story doesn’t fully belong to me anymore. People have expectations now. I owe it a decent sequel. I owe them something. And not for the first time, I find myself wondering whether writing is really the right activity for someone like me, someone whose nervous system treats every draft like a potential threat.
I also forget, every single time, how much rewriting expands the book. The first 5,000 words of Book Two quietly turn into 7,000. Scenes grow. Characters talk back. Threads appear that refuse to be cut. Oh boy. This might be another long one.
I remember reading Philip Pullman saying that he gets deeply depressed by his first drafts, and I cling to that thought more than I probably should. Because the first draft of Book Two? I hated it. Properly hated it. It felt like my skills had regressed by twenty years. I genuinely considered abandoning the whole thing.
Instead, I ran away and wrote the first draft of another idea I’d been carrying around.
I hated that too.
So I came back. One more attempt at Karma’s Burden Book Two. Then another. And then another. Last week, I started Draft Four, rewriting the opening couple of chapters again, and for the first time something shifted. I don’t love it. It still has a long way to go. But I don’t feel physically sick when I read it, which, right now, counts as progress.
Stephen King has said, more than once I think, that the difference between writers who succeed and those who don’t is persistence. I’m paraphrasing but that’s the gist. Sometimes that persistence feels less like discipline and more like a mild form of insanity: pushing through drafts you despise, sitting with the anxiety, waiting for that brief moment where you don’t feel like a completely talentless hack.
That moment doesn’t last long. But it’s enough.
So I keep writing.