Artefacts – The First Drafts

I dragged the heavy boxes from their resting-place, caked in the undisturbed dust of many years. I blew it away, the motes tumbling off to become a problem for future archaeologists and/or cleaners. With trembling hands, I unsealed the lids…

And actually put some books into them, to make more space on my shelves, alongside the many, many unsold author copies I keep in the deep darkness beneath my bed. I’ve got 2 boxes, and one is almost entirely full of The Fire Withins. (If anyone would like a copy, honestly just let me know. I’d like someone to read it.)

But the other day I was making room for some serious artefacts, from the earliest days of my ‘maybe I could actually become an author’ period.

Long ago, when the pyramids were still young and I’d just started my second year of university, I finished my first book. The rewrite of my first book, at least, for the first version of it hides in an even deeper tomb, never to be seen again. I wrote it from 11 to 16. It is not good. The rewrite… is also not particularly good, but it also lacks the rest of its sequel and therefore the second half of its story. I’ll go back to it one day.

Once I was finished, I wanted to see the damn thing. It’s a brick, at almost 200,000 words, and it was the first full-length story I’d ever set down. I remember writing fight scenes on the train to my first Edinburgh Fringe, I remember sitting at my weirdly long desk in my student halls and typing away for hours. And when I was done, I went to the library, and took advantage of those delicious free print credits. You got lots of those, for essays and such, but even a humanities degree barely made a dent in my allowance (thank you, iPad, for storing so many seminar readings and sources). 200,000 words made many hundreds of pages.

And so, on premium UCL library paper, bound in premium cardboard that I got from the stationery shop underneath the entrance hall, I had myself the first and only physical copy of The Seven Shards.

The Seven Shards (left), them novellas (right)

It was just a nice thing to have – this was long before I’d even considered self-publishing (and this book will not be thus published for a very long time), or agents, or anything. I just wrote it because I wanted that story out of my head, and to see it physically out of my head was something special.

And I didn’t stop there. Three cyberpunk novellas, that I really need to go back to and redo because they’re not that bad, printed and bound at my little amateur press. The original version of The Blackbird and the Ghost, with all its unwieldy scenes and typos. The original print of the revised version of The Blackbird and the Ghost… with all its unwieldy scenes and typos that I still haven’t fixed to this day. Those university printers did sterling work for me, all those years ago. If I had print credits I’d still be nipping back to campus and printing off my later works; as I am now limited by paper and ink I actually have to pay for I’ve only done a hard proof of the short and sweet The Fire Within.

Spot the difference. (Original in black, revised in green.)

So many words that have never been printed again.

They’ve been on my shelves for many years, these completely unique books, these artefacts. They are my early days of writing in physical form. I’ve put them away now, not for any emotional reason but purely because I needed a little more shelf space and, because I wrote them, it’s not like I’m frequently rereading them. Into the box with the other author copies they have gone, tucked under my bed.

They won’t stay there forever. They will, in fact, be rather useful if and when I ever get around to revising versions of those unpublished works – it’s nice to have an actual book to read when considering how to rewrite them. They’ll need rewriting, a lot of it. I’m a very different writer now to the one I was a decade ago. But they will always be reminders of where I started.

As for the two Blackbirds, well. If I ever make the big time, maybe they’ll make nice auction items one day. Or more likely I shall hoard them, safe in the knowledge that nobody else will ever have as first an edition as me.