Deborah Kalin

Deborah Kalin on writing Shadow Queen

Shadow Queen is my first published novel, but in my head, it's my third second novel.

Writing my first novel was easy: I was unhindered by thoughts of publication, and unconscious of any elements of the craft of writing. I was simply putting down on paper the story that lurked in my head. It was only when I finished it that I looked into the practicalities of publishing... and learned 250,000 words is decidedly long, too long for a debut novel.

I set about querying it anyway, and turned in the meantime to writing my second novel -- which would be shorter!

This proved harder, however. The process of writing my first novel, and the writing circle I'd joined in the meantime, had taught me so much about the craft that writing wasn't a purely subconscious affair any more. It used to be muscle memory but now I was concentrating on it, analysing it and critiquing it and learning new techniques. More conscious of the publishing market now, I was also trying to write to a word count, which I'd never done before.

The first second novel ran afoul of NaNoWriMo: I tried to write too much, too fast, and outpaced the story. My second second novel progressed better, but was interrupted by a trip to Clarion South, which packed even more learning into my head. When I returned, six weeks of accelerated learning and sleep deprivation took its toll, and I wasn't having much luck picking up the interrupted novel. The story was just so tied up in the words I'd used, words that now seemed clunky and lifeless.
In the middle of all this, sometime in the dead of night, the first chapter of Shadow Queen dropped into my head, all of a piece. It was so vivid and compelling a scene, of a young girl trapped in a church in the middle of a slaughter, that I wrote it down immediately. And once I'd written that first scene, it all poured out, a natural progression of answering the questions the first scene had raised.
Without quite realising it, I'd started my third second novel.

It wasn't any easier or harder than the first two had been. In fact, here's a snippet from my journal midway through the writing of Shadow Queen:

"There has always been this manuscript hungry for words I cannot produce, there will always be this manuscript hungry for words I cannot produce...
"I dream, sometimes... I dream that I’m talking to people, ones with a pulse and thoughts of their own, people I have not written. Sometimes, I dream that I sleep. But I know it’s not true."

Obviously not one of my better days!

But this novel wouldn't let me go. No matter that I didn't know the story's outcome, or even its shape as it unfolded, no matter that there were days I didn't trust it to be any good.

Every novel teaches its author something, and one of the things Shadow Queen taught me was that sometimes, you have to push yourself past your own point of no return in order to get going -- and that you can have an obscene amount of fun in doing so!