breaking up with a finished novel

it doesn't have to be forever

Hello sequelists, this month instead of working on my sequel, I’ve been working on the novel it’s the sequel to, Parallel Lines. I mentioned seven months ago that I was ready to start sending it out to agents, and… um, no, not quite. When I recently started writing a query letter describing the novel, I started to mention a couple of aspects and it struck me that there were further improvements I could make on those aspects. So I had a very quick read through the novel, and also found a sentence or two in nearly every chapter that I could see how to improve. To put that in context, that’s maybe 50 improvable sentences in a 110,000 word novel. It’s asymptotically approaching every single sentence being exactly as I want it, but I don’t think perfection is possible (for me).

I now remember that I originally thought I had finished it on 31st August 2022, exactly two years ago. I wrote more than 90% of it in 2021 and finished the first draft in the early days of 2022, knowing that there was a ton of editing to do. By the end of August, working on it every weekend and nearly every evening, I had done it all and I put “final draft” on the cover page before setting it aside. Since then, every few months, I’ve had further ideas for improvement, most notably from a series of writing classes I took via zoom in late 2023. (I learned a lot from the Creative Writing MA, but I’m still learning, which I find very encouraging – the reason I did the MA was because my writing hadn’t improved for a decade.)

What I realised this August was that one of the key things people will read Parallel Lines as being about is getting back together with someone you’ve broken up with. It’s a feature of the plot which allows me to skip over stretches of time because I wanted the novel to be about what the characters are like in their early and mid and late 20s as they grow as people, and as society changes around them. I didn’t pay much attention to this plot feature in the first draft. Getting back together with an ex-lover doesn’t seem like a very big deal to me. I think it’s quite a common experience to get back together with friends you haven’t seen for years, when circumstances bring you back together, and discover that the friendship is as rewarding as ever, if not more so. So why not resume being lovers? It is possible, but it seems to be a much rarer experience, even in LGBT+ communities where monogamy is far less sacred. I realised, perhaps a year ago, that Parallel Lines is something of a manifesto for being open to rekindling old relationships if circumstances have changed such that the reasons you broke up no longer apply. My recent realisation was that I hadn’t said quite enough about what the two characters were thinking about it as they did it. So that’s what I’ve been fixing.

When I saw that I thought I’d finished editing the novel two years ago, it struck me that there’s a parallel here between the way I’ve been editing the book, and its content (and I do love a good parallel, don’t you?) At this point, the way I’ve kept finishing it then rediscovering it and then going back and making it better than ever, is a bit like breaking up with a lover, then meeting them again and remembering what was so good about them, resuming the relationship, remembering what made it so difficult to be with them, and breaking up once again.

Once a book is published, it’s really over forever, at least if it’s traditionally published. For novels, it’s vanishingly rare for the publisher to accept changes that would require re-typesetting and re-proofreading. But it’s only the editing which is finally over, as the book goes on to all kinds of other relationships – with its readers. I very much want that for Parallel Lines, I love it and I want it to have its best life. And the last two years of on-and-off editing have made its story of an on-and-off relationship much better than it was. (And it was already good: three years ago my mentor Preti Taneja said it was “great” and publishable, and then the MA assessors gave the first few chapters a distinction mark.)

Unfortunately, while I’ve ruminated, my first choice of agent, the one which would have been absolutely ideal, has stopped accepting submissions, so now I have to search for others. The next update here will include how many agent query letters I’ve sent out.