It’s Official: Starforge is the Most Stressful Thing I’ve Ever Written · 8:00pm Oct 16th, 2020
All right, readers. It’s time to come clean. Last night, as I lay trying to sleep at around 4 AM, my mind whirling with questions and maybes and possibilities concerning Starforge, I realized something.
Starforge is officially the most stress-inducing project I’ve worked on in a long time.
Perhaps being kept up until hours like 5 AM thinking “Maybe I need to start over. Redo the entire opening like this?” should be taken as a massive clue.
For the record I’ve not restarted the entire opening. Though … yeah, even at 100,000 words in, I’ve considered completely redoing it from another angle. More than once. Technically I’ve already done it too; earlier in the project I cut 20,000 words and started the opening in a completely different way.
This project is stressing me out.
Why? Well, it’s pretty simple. Starforge is the finale of a trilogy. There are two books before it, both really well received and loved by a lot of people. Further still, those who have read the sequel have ranked it better than the first book, even as it drove things forward toward a finale. So the trend is now I have to deliver a finale that’s the apex of all three, tie everything up, keep everything from almost a million words of prior content straight, reference it, use it …
Yeah … starting to see how I might be a little stressed out? And of course, stress like that makes it harder to work (lack of sleep, etc) which has made me more concerned that the final product could be below the bar, which leads to more stress, which …
Yup. It’s self-enforcing at this point. The worst part is, I’m not quite sure what to do outside of trust my instincts (I had lighter versions of this for previous works and they turned out all right) and keep working forward.
Starforge has to be the best thing I’ve written to date. Full stop. If that means rewriting almost 100,000 words of it, then so be it. That’s only two months worth of work. This is the big finale. The end. Everything the prior two books led up to comes to a head here. This is it.
I can’t stop. One way or another Starforge is going to release. And it will be the next book I release after Axtara. But it has to be the best thing I’ve written. Every bit of character I’ve built up so far, every nuance, every bit of development. All of it needs to peak here.
I’m just praying I can pull this off.
Anyway, I’m about to dive back into it. Wish me luck, folks. This is the mountain of mountains thus far in my career, and that peak has got a lot of obstacles on it.
Now if I could just get some sleep …
You have my sympathies, man. The only story I ever wrote that left me stressed for the majority of it was Songbird, because I wanted it to be good and my prereaders hit it hard. Which, y'know, was the reason I picked the specific prereaders I had. That story should have taken a couple months, and I spent over a year on it, mostly agonizing over the edits. Releasing it was beyond relieving.
Sorry to hear you're losing sleep over it.
Do you think you could put parts of the story into lockdown where you're not allowed to edit it until later? It may help you focus on the rest of the book, as long as you can be comfortable with looking away for a minute while those parts settle out of your immediate awareness.
Then again, I'm not the mastermind behind a galaxy-spanning trilogy. I do hope you can escape the escalating stress cycle for a while, at least.
I can relate to being stressed even when I'm just working on a baby 100 000 word novel. All the plot elements to keep in mind and arcs to carefully consider into each part of the story and just trying to make the story flow well - keep in mind it's only the first draft so I haven't even gotten to the editing pains. So yeah, if just this is enough to make me feel stressed, I wish you all the luck in the world that your book ends up well.
As a purveyor of your books, you don't need luck at all.