From Blackbird to Ghost – How I Wrote It

Just under 5 years ago, I started really being an author.

Wednesday the 5th of June marks the 5th birthday of The Blackbird and the Ghost – not the first book I’d written, even back then, but the first one that I thought might be worth showing the rest of the world. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing back in 2019. I still don’t. But I did it anyway.

How? Well, I’m glad you didn’t ask.

But before I start: from its birthday on Wednesday the 5th until Sunday the 9th, The Blackbird and the Ghost will be FREE in digital form to celebrate.

To talk about how I first wrote Blackbird, I have to cast my mind back a lot more than 5 years – try 9. The second term of my second year of university, grappling with medieval history and mid-rehearsal for a production of The Comedy of Errors… and for some reason, the time I chose to get cracking on not just a new novel but on my first proper short story, too. ‘A Discourse on the Prisoner’s Cinema’ was very hastily written in the History Department common room in January, probably around the time of auditions and callbacks for the aforementioned play.

On the 6th of February, so midway through the rehearsal period, I created a Word doc called ‘Dungeon Crawler’. I wrote the prologue of what is now The Blackbird and the Ghost. I think it was the first line that came to me out of nowhere – which is still one of my favourite lines I’ve written, honestly – and the rest of the tomb and the names just flowed out from there.

At some point in the intervening years I learned how to format properly, too.

Importantly, this wasn’t the Boiling Seas yet. They don’t really get mentioned in that first scene – if they do, I added them in later. Tal was here, his job and moniker were here… but not his world. Not yet. That came a week or so later, when, not just during The Comedy of Errors but onstage – probably during a dress rehearsal rather than the actual live show, but still – I opened up my sketchbook and I drew a map. This map.

I’m not actually very good at drawing, but I can just about manage a map.

For context, I wasn’t anyone important in The Comedy of Errors – just a fruit-seller with a few lines at the beginning, before I and my fellow background cast did Generally Immersive Background Things in the marketplace set around the actual plot. Playing cards, going to the pub, having pineapples stolen by small children, etc. Jotting some things down in a sketchbook was deemed perfectly acceptable, especially as my nice leatherbound sketchbook (which I need to get out again and resume my sporadic attempts to learn to draw well) fit the aesthetic very nicely.

And thanks to Danté Kim I have an actual photo of me starting the map during rehearsal! Look at that tiny beardless face.

I’m not sure I was drawing the map for my half-started story – but I soon put them together. And I started writing. Apparently, I started writing fast. I created that original Word doc on the 6th of February… and I finished it on the 18th of May. 102 days for a whole book!

No, don’t do the maths and tell me that’s only 600 words a day on average when I always write a minimum of 500 anyway. Stop it. Put that calculator down.

Having performed this monumental feat of literature… I then forgot about it for 2 years.

I had things to do: degrees to finish, comedy to write and perform, and some other books to write, too – I think I went onto those cyberpunk novellas next. I should revisit those. So ‘Dungeon Crawler’ languished on my hard drive for some time… but during that time, I became a professional author. In the sense that I got paid for writing things that were then published. And with some short stories under my belt, I belatedly realised that self-publishing was possible – reasonably simple, even, with KDP – and I wondered if I had anything that would suit.

I did, of course. I had ‘Dungeon Crawler’, which had at some point acquired the series title of ‘The Boiling Seas’, though not yet its actual novel title. Almost exactly 2 years after I started writing it, I started editing it. This seems to have been a rather perfunctory process, mostly dedicated to switching Max’s gender… which, after 5 years, I should really do another pass at just to check I didn’t miss any pronouns…

And then I set to work doing this ‘author’ thing ‘properly’. I created this website/blog. I began unravelling how KDP worked. I spent far too long making a cover with some really rubbish photo editing tools.

This isn’t all of them. It’s really not.

I tweaked. I massaged. I enlisted for the first time my long-suffering proofreaders (my dad and my friend Jack). I tweaked some more. It was a leisurely process. Back then, I hadn’t started a streak of a book every year or so. Back then, absolutely nobody knew who I was.  

At some point, I came up with a title.

And then, on the 5th of June, The Blackbird and the Ghost spread its wings and flew.

It did ok. It did far better than I’d ever realistically expected. Some people – perhaps even some of you – read it. Some people even reviewed it. It’s been in competitions – it made the semi-finals of the SPFBO, which is the best I’ve ever done in any of the SP things. It’s had one sequel, and I’m working on another.

More than 1100 people have a copy of The Blackbird and the Ghost, at the time of writing. It’s taken 5 years for that to happen, of course. But Tal Wenlock and his little witchlight have come a long way since February 2016.

I’m proud of this book. It’s not that long. It’s a bit messy. The plot isn’t the strongest even if I do like the worldbuilding an awful lot. There are typos. There are mistakes. But it’s mine. And people, by and large, seem to have liked it.

I liked it enough to keep the story going. Nightingale’s Sword is also a book I’m proud of, as – hopefully – will be its sequel, the conclusion to this completely accidental trilogy. I just didn’t want to leave those characters where they were, and they didn’t want to stay there, either. Who knows when I’ll really be done with those three birds?

Blackbird was the first book I thought was actually good enough for other people to read. It was a big step. Putting my work out there for the entire world to judge was and remains terrifying. But now, I at least know that a handful of people will probably read whatever my new ventures are. Back then… I had no safety net, beyond a few kind friends who picked up a copy. I had nothing but faith in my words.

It paid off.

5 years later, here I am editing Untitled Boiling Seas Book 3. I’m so much busier than I was back then. There’s so much less time and headspace to get stuck in. But I can still dive into that world I accidentally created back in 2016, no matter what else is going on. And soon you lot will be able to do the same.

The Blackbird and the Ghost is 5 years old. I’ve talked about its past. Next week, I think it’s about time I talked about its future.

Stay tuned.

And get a free copy next week if you haven’t already – and if you have, please tell me what you thought of Blackbird, in whatever way you choose.