The Videshi Dilemma

Major excitement at reaching a big milestone late April. The first draft of The Videshi Dilemma is complete, at 106k words. Now the fun part’s done, it’s on with the real work of editing, revising, getting feedback, revising some more … I expect this to last into early 2025 before I can start thinking about final stages leading up to publication.

Every novel I write throws up different challenges and develops in its own way. No two novels are alike, and this one is no exception. What’s unique about this latest story is how linear the writing turned out to be.

My writing process is usually pretty messy. I have a few scenes in mind and I write them, regardless of where they crop up in the story. When I get stuck, I’m happy to leap ahead to a scene that interests me. This can be seen visually in my “Writing progress” chart. I always split my manuscript up over nine or ten documents, and track word count each week. In this table, each column is a document and is colored to show state of completion down the page – from red (in progress) to green (essentially complete).

Here is the chart from Wrath of Empire. You can see how ragged it is. Lots of documents started in parallel and they don’t all finish in sequence. This is a very typical picture of works up to now.

Here is the chart from The Videshi Dilemma. What a difference.

I’m struggling to explain why this story developed in such a different pattern to my normal chaos, but one possibility is that this is the first novel I’ve written all from one point of view. Others have had at least two, and more often three or more interleaved points of view. That’s a messier picture to keep track of.

Writing a whole novel from one person’s perspective presented very different challenges, but maybe more on that another time. Meanwhile, after a full read through, I’m happy with what I’ve got so far.